Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

sense that they were being made as much for the body of Munro’s work as for any individual book. In the same 1994 profile in which Munro talks about her acting for the Blyth Festival, Diane Turbide wrote, “ ‘The incomparable Alice Munro,’ as a
New York Times
critic recently described her, ‘is not just a good writer but a great one, the first Canada has produced.’ ”
    In the same piece Turbide quotes Menaker on Munro: “She’s a distinctive, original and complex voice.… And the things she says with that voice – her stories – are vastly interesting and complicated, and work on every single level that you would ask a piece of writing to work on. She has very few equals in the entire history of short fiction – I feel very sure about that.” 1 When he said that, Menaker had just left the
New Yorker
to work at Random House. Having been completely enthusiastic about Munro’s stories from the time McGrath got them from Barber and brought them to the magazine, Menaker had been the logical replacement editor once McGrath took up other work there. Menaker was her editor from 1988 through most of 1994; he handled five of the seven stories first published in the
New Yorker
from
Friend of My Youth
and all seven of those in
Open Secrets
.
    The last Munro story Menaker edited was “The Albanian Virgin.” It grew out of Munro’s pursuit of the circumstances of a Clinton librarian named Minnie Rudd, who had been “captured – c. 1900 – by ‘bandits in Albania,’ ” as she wrote to Metcalf in early 1988. In some significant ways that story encapsulates what might be seen as Munro’s second phase as a
New Yorker
writer, a time when she was well established there while changes occurred within the magazine itself. McGrath shifted to other responsibilities as the new editor Gottlieb’s deputy, and Menaker became Munro’s editor as 1988 began; he finally met her in New York about that time, despite their decade-old connection. Menaker continued as her editor – and that of numerous other authors besides – through the transition from Gottlieb to Tina Brown, the young Englishwoman who hadpreviously transformed
Vanity Fair
, and who was made editor of the
New Yorker
in 1992 to effect the same transformation there. As editor, she set about changing the magazine in myriad ways, striving to make it more topical, cutting the space devoted to fiction by half, introducing photography, creating what was always called “buzz” around the magazine. Radically, too, she began running stories signed on the first page rather than the last, long the magazine’s custom.
    “The Albanian Virgin” ran as the centrepiece of a “buzz” double issue called “The
New Yorker
Celebrates Fiction,” one that included five other stories, a piece by Roger Angell on what makes a
New Yorker
story, selections from past
New Yorker
stories, and various other fiction-connected items. Most strikingly, there was a “portfolio” of photographs of fourteen
New Yorker
authors by staff photographer Richard Avedon; in May 1994 most of them had come to New York for a party and to be photographed, Munro among them. There their images are, standing side-by-side with varying expressions of seriousness and rapt delight, spread across seven pages. Describing the circumstances producing the images, Menaker wrote that “Bobbie Ann Mason was startled and flattered to learn that Alice Munro and her husband had travelled through western Kentucky because they admired her work and wanted to see the region her stories describe. Tom Drury – along with nearly everyone else, it seemed – was delighted to meet Alice Munro at last; they had been carrying on a lively correspondence for months.” The shared delight at meeting Munro stemmed, probably, from her own buzz. Because she avoided the literary limelight in favour of Clinton, Comox, and driving with Fremlin, she was seen as something of a literary enigma.
    While she had little specific sense of the magazine’s relations with its writers, and perhaps did not know much about Munro, Tina Brown saw the June 27 and July 4 1994 all-fiction issue as a chance to draw attention to the
New Yorker
’s distinguished record as a publisher of fiction. With its party and pictures, and a hyperbolic cover showing the figure of Liberty, fireworks behind, extending her arms over a group of famed American writers each holding her or his major book, the issue really was a celebration of fiction. Ironically,