Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

given this patriotic imagery, Munro’s “The Albanian Virgin” served as the issue’s centrepiece, andthe portfolio of pictures is followed immediately by her Canadian story.
    Menaker recalls his work as Munro’s editor as “the high point of my editorial work – at once the greatest fun and the greatest privilege of my career.” His work is not now so well documented as McGrath’s, but Menaker’s recollections suggest just how her work was handled. “Since Alice’s stories are often a-chronological, there were one or two occasions, as with ‘Vandals’ in particular, when I would suggest taking a whole section and putting it elsewhere.” On another occasion, Menaker noticed the phrase “a real life” in the story they were working on and suggested it to Munro on the phone as a better title – it was then being called “A Form of Marriage.” Munro agreed. Particularly, too, Menaker recalls “punctuation issues, especially with comma splices – two independent clauses that Alice had a fondness for hooking together with a measly comma – forget the conjunction and hold the semicolon. At first these constructions troubled me, but after a while I saw that she used them only in selected places, and I began to leave them alone and defend them from the invading hordes of copy editors and proofreaders indignant over this punctuation transgression.… I had a name for this unruly device of hers – I started calling it ‘The Munro Splice’ to myself.” Throughout Munro’s papers there are numerous instances of this splice, where it is indeed a characteristic device of hers. They frequently reached print, and just as Menaker said, she uses them at key junctures in her stories.
    Menaker never edited Munro for style, “because her style was her voice, her natural way of speaking at its very best (I found this out when I met her).” He saw his work with her to be equivalent to his editing of Pauline Kael, who would “read her sentences out loud to see if, as she put it, ‘they sound like me.’ ” Munro, he remembers, “knew when an idea I had for changing a word or syntax or sentence structure of hers sounded like her or didn’t. As with Kael, I think I got better at hearing sentences as Alice would write them.” Menaker sees working with Munro and Kael as instrumental in his development of his own voice as a fiction writer. Summarizing their working relation, Menaker wrote that “Munro was always very cooperative and courteous – if anything, I think she was a little too easy about accepting suggestions, but afterhaving worked with more than a few real doozy narcissists, I realized then and appreciate even more now what a joy she was to work with.”
    For her part, Munro found Menaker to be a congenial partner as they worked together on her stories. Writing him about “A Real Life” in November 1991, she asks him what he thinks of “Around the Horn” as a title and continues, “I know Wilkie is a kind of a prince in a fairy tale. I guess the whole problem is – I’m really interested in Millicent, in seeing everything through her eyes. Her emotional attachment to women, aversion to sex, something submerged and confused. (She’s based a lot on my mother) so it’s mostly what she’d understand. But I agree it may not be enough. I’ve added a piece to make it a bit stronger. What do you think? And I thought the dog bit was O.K. It’s not Dorrie he sniffs but the idea of her life – the trapping and gutting, etc. Is that clear?
All suggestions welcome.”
In its indications of their shared shaping of her work, the questions and implied responses it contains, this passage reveals Munro’s own sense of the story as she works in partnership with Menaker. Throughout such letters, Munro may be seen reaching toward the form she seeks; in another, this one regarding “The Albanian Virgin,” she begins, “I’ve taken my new scissors to Lottar (or the A.V.) with drastic results. Not enough to make it publishable, maybe – it’s still long and weird – but enough to cure, I think, the imbalance, leaving the ‘frame’ around the Albanian stuff as a definite, though fairly heavy frame, cutting all the Donald and Nelson and concentrating mostly on Charlotte through the narrator’s eyes surrounding Charlotte’s story.” Amid the serious work they did together, Munro also often jokes, writing at the end of a note regarding some changes to “The Albanian Virgin,” for instance,