{"id":167656,"date":"2024-05-24T10:00:24","date_gmt":"2024-05-24T14:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=167656"},"modified":"2024-05-25T13:45:14","modified_gmt":"2024-05-25T17:45:14","slug":"inside-alice-munros-notebooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/05\/24\/inside-alice-munros-notebooks\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Alice Munro\u2019s Notebooks"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

All images courtesy Alice Munro fonds, University of Calgary Archives and Special Collections”<\/p><\/div>\n

For her twenty-first birthday, in July 1952, Alice Munro\u2019s husband gave her a typewriter. The present was as much a symbolic offering as a practical one. As Robert Thacker records in his biography,\u00a0Jim Munro, a manager at Eaton\u2019s, the Canadian department store, wanted to assure his young wife, who at the time had just a single publication to her name\u2014a story read on one of the CBC\u2019s radio programs\u2014that she was the real thing and could act like it.<\/p>\n

Yet Munro, the Nobel laureate who passed away last week at the age of ninety-two, never entirely quit the habit of longhand. On deposit with her manuscripts, correspondence, and other papers at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, are several folders of notebooks. In them one finds a little bit of everything: fragments and false starts, alternate endings, even drawings. The notebooks were where Munro tinkered and experimented, made detours and sudden revisions\u2014where she surveyed the whole field of possibility before committing herself to a full, typed version of a story.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

As a result, she leaves behind an especially revealing record of her process. Earlier this year, when I visited the archive, I stumbled across a notebook in which Munro drafted two of her finest short stories, \u201cThe Progress of Love\u201d and \u201cMiles City, Montana.\u201d The notebook, medium-size, is filled with blue and black ink, its lined pages crammed with Munro\u2019s plain and legible cursive. A thrilling find, it captures not only her creative method but a crucial point in her development as a writer.<\/p>\n

Both \u201cThe Progress of Love\u201d and \u201cMiles City, Montana\u201d date to the mid-eighties. Munro by then was in her fifties. She had published four collections of stories and a novel, Lives of Girls and Women<\/em>. But, as she often said, her career was just beginning. She and Jim had divorced in the early seventies, and after two decades of living in Vancouver, Munro returned to her native southwestern Ontario\u2014Sowesto, as it is sometimes called\u2014a jut of bottomlands and farming country wedged between Lakes Huron and Erie. She married for a second time\u2014to the cartographer Gerald Fremlin\u2014and acquired an agent, who among other things secured Munro a first-look agreement with The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Settled into this perch of stability and middle age, Munro became a very different kind of writer from the one we encounter in her earlier books. The works she composed in this period are longer and less linear, more openly subversive of the short story\u2019s traditional unities, the notion it should take place in the course of a day or a few hours and in a single setting, like \u201cThe Dead\u201d or \u201cA Good Man is Hard to Find.\u201d Yet, thanks to Munro\u2019s notebook, we can see that she did often start her later stories this way, laying them out in a more straightforward or conventional path. Reading through its contents, one does not find a great deal of crossed-out words or marginal scribbling. Instead of worrying over a sentence, Munro concentrated her energies on questions of structure, on finding the right arrangement of the parts, and where she might skip around in time for effect.<\/p>\n

Much of the first draft of \u201cThe Progress of Love,\u201d for instance, occurs in a hotel, where the main character of the story, a girl named Euphemia, or Phemie, eats lunch with her parents and aunt. During the meal, she listens as they talk about a day when Phemie\u2019s grandmother threatened to hang herself because her husband had supposedly taken an interest in another woman. Phemie\u2019s mom and aunt disagree, though, over some of the salient features of the anecdote; the aunt, Beryl, insists it was a joke, that the noose wasn\u2019t even tied to the ceiling beam. \u201cShe meant it more than you give her credit for,\u201d Phemie\u2019s mother replies.<\/p>\n

As she continued working on the story, Munro preserved this exchange, but she enlarged on it, too, using it as the basis for a long flashback placed at the outset of the story and told from the point of view of Phemie\u2019s mother, recounting the morning she went into the family\u2019s barn and saw her own mother standing on a chair with a rope tied around her neck. \u201cStory Mother\u201d is how Munro labeled this passage in a quick outline she wrote after completing the draft.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the outline, we can see Munro\u2019s intention to break up the story into multiple chapters and time schemes, though she continued to be uncertain about other things. Having drafted \u201cThe Progress of Love\u201d in the third person, she switched to the first, and it stayed that way until galleys were printed, when Munro went through and changed every \u201cI\u201d to a \u201cPhemie\u201d or a \u201cshe.\u201d Then, just before publication, she changed them all back again. Munro could be a tireless reviser. It was not uncommon for her to alter a story after it had appeared in a magazine, publishing a different version in her books.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And yet, when one turns to the section of the notebook devoted to \u201cMiles City, Montana,\u201d one is struck by how much is left unchanged\u2014how much persists from this initial draft, which takes up more than forty pages and is roughly eight thousand words long, to the work\u2019s final iteration. \u201cIn 1961,\u201d the draft begins, \u201cwe got a new car, a brand-new car, a Morris Oxford.\u201d The story follows a family of four as they make their way across the northern edge of the United States one summer, taking a southerly route from Vancouver to Ontario. One day, when they stop for lunch, one of the children almost drowns when she sees a comb in the deep end of a swimming pool and dives in after it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cThat really happened you see,\u201d Munro would say years later in an interview with the Virginia Quarterly Review<\/em>, describing the time her daughter Jenny was lured by a comb into a pool in Montana. She was four years old, and Jim Munro\u2014like Andrew, his fictional counterpart in \u201cMiles City, Montana\u201d\u2014had to jump in and pull her out.<\/p>\n

As Munro recreates the moment in her notebook, the narrator can\u2019t help but reflect on how the rest of the day would have gone if the outcome had been different. \u201cWe could still have been in Miles City,\u201d she thinks, \u201cin an undertaker\u2019s office, the drowned body prepared for shipment\u2014to Vancouver, where we had never even noticed a cemetery? To Ontario, where we visited graves?\u201d<\/p>\n

When revising the piece, Munro would leave these sentences largely intact. But it is at this point that the published version and the draft start to diverge. In the notebook, the morbid conjurings of graves and preparing bodies for shipment last until the narrator is recalling another baby she had, years before, who did not survive. This child, \u201cthe child who died, the baby, went into a shoebox\u2014they told me that at the undertaker\u2019s\u2014and was put into the grave of somebody being buried without ceremony, or relatives, at public expense.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Here, Munro is again drawing from life. In July 1955 she gave birth to a daughter, Catherine, who because of kidney failure lived for just fourteen hours. The experience was one Munro would touch on again and again in her writings\u2014though not in any of her published ones. Reading through the material stored in Calgary, one encounters the image of a deceased newborn consigned to a shoebox in many drafts and fragments, and in a poem Munro wrote addressed to \u201cmy dark child.\u201d<\/p>\n

In subsequent drafts of \u201cMiles City,\u201d though, Munro cut the passage about the dead baby. While the story would appear to be one of her most personal\u2014so much it is tempting to label it \u201cautobiographical in form but not in fact,\u201d to borrow a term Munro applied to much of her work\u2014the notebook also allows us to see how, eventually, she turned away from autobiography, suppressing the urge to bring other aspects of her life into the story.<\/p>\n

By writing about \u201cthe child who died,\u201d Munro seems to be recognizing that she needs something more, that the draft is stalled.\u00a0<\/span>Having set down the sketch of near-drowning, she must figure out what to do with it, what its ultimate payoff will be. Devoted initially to the quotidian horrors of parenting, to those everyday fears and dalliances with the abyss that mothers and fathers endure, the draft also begins to hint at some vast, unbridgeable incompatibility between the narrator and Andrew. Then we read this:<\/p>\n

\n

My father came across the field carrying the boy who had drowned. It was a body he carried, not resembling Steven Gauley so much\u2014swollen from being a long time\u2014a day and a night, in the water, and with his nostrils full of mud.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It seems like a wild digression, the germ or start of a new piece. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

For many writers, it probably would be. But when Munro came up with this, she saw something else. While the scene lurched back to the time of the narrator\u2019s childhood, what Munro had just done was write the first sentences of the story. The notebook visibly betrays her excitement. She immediately starts over, recasting the sentence in the third person\u2014\u201cSophie can see her father walking across the field carrying the boy who has been drowned\u201d\u2014and then goes on, writing in a rush, not bothering with paragraph division as she fills in additional details. After that, the draft abruptly gives out, as if Munro knew she had what she needed and could move on to a typed manuscript.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

When it was published in the January 6, 1985, issue of The New Yorker<\/em>, \u201cMiles City, Montana\u201d would begin with three pages about the search for Steve Gauley. The men and dogs who go hunting for him; the fact that there is \u201cno woman,\u201d as Munro says, not even an aunt or a grandmother, to deliver the body to\u2014all that is the same as we read in the notebook. But Munro reverted to the first person, and she\u2019d also made the narrator a friend and playmate of Gauley\u2019s. The boy\u2019s funeral is held in her home. Seeing most of the town gathered there in their finest attire, singing hymns, the narrator confesses to \u201ca furious and sickening disgust,\u201d since she feels that by dressing death up in this way, in the rites of ceremony, the adults around her are not only rationalizing it but consenting to it.<\/p>\n

The finished version of the story, then, reads as a masterly example of counterpoint. Munro places the two events, separated by twenty years, side by side, telling of one child who drowned, and one who didn\u2019t. The narrator, in the end, identifies with all parties. She is the parent who, in imagining the death of her youngest child, knows she has made peace with death. And she is the child who condemns her for that peace, as her own children, she sees, will do to her some day. \u201cSo we went on, with the two in the back seat trusting us, because of no choice, and we ourselves trusting to be forgiven, in time,\u201d Munro writes at the story\u2019s close.<\/p>\n

In her later years, Munro increasingly tended to work in this manner. The move we witness in the notebook\u2014the way she manipulates chronology in order to latch onto the right framing device, the complementary part\u2014is one she would perform again and again in the books published in her sixties and seventies. Stories like \u201cCarried Away,\u201d \u201cFamily Furnishings,\u201d \u201cThe Bear Came Over the Mountain,\u201d and \u201cPowers,\u201d to name just a few, are intricate collages, spanning decades. \u201cA story is not like a road to follow,\u201d Munro declared in the introduction to her Selected Stories <\/em>(1996); \u201cit\u2019s more like a house.\u201d She went on:<\/p>\n

\n

You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space \u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Benjamin Hedin is a writer and filmmaker. He is the author, most recently, of a novel,<\/em> Under the Spell, and is currently working on a book about Alice Munro.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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