Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

“Isn’t this a dandy for the checkers? Albania! Montenegro! Joe Hill!
Perkin Warbeck!”
    Munro’s letters to Menaker reveal her a person out on a high wire, intuitively feeling what she is after in a story but needing her editor’s response as she works toward it. A letter she wrote to him in July 1993 encapsulates her need; given its timing, it may be referring to “The Jack Randa Hotel,” just published by the
New Yorker
, or “Vandals,” which was to appear in the magazine that fall. In any case, Munro’s sentiment is notable:
    I was so encouraged by your letter and very grateful that you took time to write it in the middle of a holiday when you’d surely want to be free of all thoughts of – etc. etc.
    You have enormous generosity and a great understanding of how shaky I (and I suppose most writers) often feel. Also you’re a terrific editor and a fine writer – I guess I’m always a little surprised that such a good writer can be so generous – it doesn’t always go together.
    Munro signs herself “With thanks” here, with genuine thanks for help and response that Menaker has just given her so freely. Such gratitude has characterized Munro’s relations with her editors, and with her agent, throughout her career. 2
    The stories Menaker was editing, especially those that were gathered in
Open Secrets
, had qualities that displayed Munro’s further movement away from the linear and the realistic. He and his colleagues at the
New Yorker
followed her along this path, since they rejected only one of the eight, “Spaceships Have Landed” – Munro said that they thought it was “too far out.” (George Plimpton bought it for the
Paris Review
and he cut the opening detailed scene in the bootlegger’s house; Munro went along then, but reinstated the passage in the book.) What she was trying to do in these stories, she told Peter Gzowski on CBC radio’s
Morningside
when the book was published, was “to move away from what happened,” hoping to create a sense of the character’s fantasy life, to suggest what might have happened. Munro knew this was risky, since the various elements that suggest possibility “have to work pretty well or the whole story doesn’t hold at all.” Louisa in “Carried Away,” for example, is shown at the end in the 1950s having a conversation with Jack Agnew, a man she never knew but had exchanged letters with during World War I while he was overseas; the two are developing a romance through their letters, their passion is felt, but it is quashed by Agnew’s prior (and unmentioned) engagement to another girl in Carstairs. The literal problem with Louisa’s 1950s conversation with Agnew, though, is the fact that he had been dead since the early 1920s. He is horribly killed, decapitated, in an industrial accident at Doudspiano factory that is described in the story, his head “carried away.”
    Recounting how this story had taken shape, Munro told Gzowski that she thought it was complete when Louisa met her husband, the owner of Douds, through the agency of Agnew’s accidental death. But that ending did not satisfy her, so she wrote the present ending, in which Louisa and Agnew meet – perhaps fantasy, perhaps real – the reader does not know. When speaking of one such ending in
Open Secrets
, Gzowski said that he was not sure he wanted to know just what happened. Replying, Munro said, “That’s good. That’s really the response I want to get. I want to move away from what happened, to the possibility of this happening, or that happening, and a kind of idea that life is not just made up of the facts, the things that happened.… But all the things that happen in fantasy, the things that might have happened, the kind of alternate life that can almost seem to be accompanying what we call our real lives. I wanted to get all that, sort of, working together.”
    Munro also comments to Gzowski that “a story doesn’t have a single thread to me.” Through
Open Secrets
, she interweaves plot lines and, as in “Carried Away,” uses letters as a complicating, distancing technique. Letters figure also in “The Jack Randa Hotel,” “Vandals,” and “A Wilderness Station,” a story inspired by Munro’s Laidlaw ancestors homesteading in Morris township from November 1851 on, when one of them was killed by a falling tree during their second winter. There are other storytelling devices; the title story “Open Secrets” includes a ballad about the girl who