Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

was lost. Stories take readers off to Albania and to Australia, as if Munro was defiantly thumbing her nose at those critics who complained that her stories always had a drab, predictable setting. Even so, she remains rooted in Huron County and in her own experience. Minnie Rudd was from Clinton, which had a piano factory like Douds, and Gail in “The Jack Randa Hotel” goes to Brisbane, where Munro had lived for an extended period. At one point in “The Albanian Virgin” these sentences appear, describing some of Lottar’s work with the Albanian women before she becomes a virgin: “In the tobacco fields they took off their jerkins and blouses and worked half naked in the sun, hidden between the rows of the tall plants. The tobacco juice was black and sticky, like molasses, and it randown their arms and was smeared over their breasts.” Imagining this experience in an Albanian setting, Munro was recalling her own work in the tobacco fields of Ontario with Diane Lane back in 1951. In “A Real Life,” “a man in the area had named a horse after” Dorrie, just as had happened with Sarah Jane Code Laidlaw. And Lower Wingham’s geography is evident in “Spaceships Have Landed.” As she told Harry Boyle in 1974, there is always some basis in reality.
    Throughout the stories in
Open Secrets
there are occasional casual references to the piano factory in Carstairs where Jack Agnew is decapitated in “Carried Away”; through them the reader can chart the factory’s rise and decline. With six of the eight stories set in Carstairs, too, Munro creates another larger sense of shared community, connection, and culture; people in these stories are known to one another, in the way of the small town. Here she renamed the Maitland River the Peregrine, an Ontario historical joke, given that the lieutenant governor in the 1830s was Sir Peregrine Maitland. The Peregrine would flow on into “The Love of a Good Woman.”
    Munro’s use of her friend Reg Thompson’s research is evident in
Open Secrets
too. Thompson, who works in the library in Goderich, has provided Munro with material she has used in some of her stories. Drawing from his own relatives and his knowledge of the Ottawa Valley, he supplied Munro with the material on the Cameronians she used in “Friend of My Youth” – he is the person acknowledged in the book version of that story. With “Carried Away,” for which Munro asked for an industrial accident, the two ended up creating something of a mystery. Munro’s decapitation incident was inspired by a newspaper account of the death of Mazo de la Roche’s uncle Frank Lundy published in the Newmarket, Ontario,
Era
in 1886. Thompson had found the account of the accident not in the newspaper but rather in an early biography of the once-celebrated Ontario writer. Thus when Joan Givner, a subsequent de la Roche biographer, wrote to Munro about the correspondences she saw between the two writers, she was disappointed to find that Munro had not read de la Roche. In a lecture she gave about the correspondences, “The Mysteries of the Severed Head,” Givner sees parallels between the two writers but does not address just how she thinksthe newspaper description got into Munro’s story. Reg Thompson brought it to her, as he has other facts that Munro, through her stories, has transformed into truths. 3

    A week after
Open Secrets
was published in the fall of 1994, a profile appeared in the
Globe and Mail
that began by recounting a story of Munro’s – an anecdote, not a short story. As a volunteer supporting the Blyth Festival, Munro was waiting table at a supper in the Blyth Hall during summer 1993. She was summoned by a man who asked if the woman across the room, who looked “artistic and dramatic,” might be the “famous lady writer who lives near here.” “ ‘I’m not sure,’ admitted the waitress. She sized up the woman and then, encouragingly, whispered back, ‘Yes, I think that might be her.’ ” Telling this story to Val Ross, the reporter, Munro gave “a guilty laugh.… ‘I wanted that man to have this vision of a writer with beautiful red hair. I did it because she was so beautiful.’ ” True enough, but for Munro herself and with her wry sense of celebrity and humour, the chance was too good to miss. Later in the profile, Ross describes Munro “dressed in the same flowing, patterned pants she wore for a multi-page photograph Richard Avedon took of the giants of modern fiction”