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 after having 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, “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 Douds piano 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 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 ran down 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 thinks the 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” earlier that year for the New Yorker and writes that Munro is “still puzzling over why she gave up perfectly good housekeeping and writing time to go to New York in May for that Avedon photo. ‘The next day I met John Updike on the street outside the Algonquin Hotel. He said, “Why did we do that?” Neither of us knew.’ ”
Perhaps not, but Tina Brown’s New Yorker photo party, in conjunction with the story of the beautiful red-haired “writer” in the Blyth Hall, captures Alice Munro very well just as Open Secrets was going to press. Her stories were compelling in just the ways Menaker and other literary types knew, and in the ways she explained to Gzowski. Munro was well aware of this and, at home in Clinton, still quite grounded: she did rue “housekeeping and writing time.” But equally, too, the sociable and very well-read Munro did not want to miss a party with such an invitation list. Besides, the trip also gave her a chance to see Barber and Close, and to be in New York. In the course of his description of the New Yorker party, Menaker wrote, “Alice Munro felt at home enough to take off her shoes. ‘They hurt,’ she said, ‘so I just took them off.’ She explained that she had worn those particular shoes ‘so I would look taller in the pictures.’ ” The New York Review of Books gave David Levine the New Yorker picture as the basis of its drawing for its review of Open Secrets: there she is, staring right back at the viewer just as she is in the Avedon photograph, making eye contact – they have used that drawing in their subsequent reviews of Munro’s books. In the course of her profile, Ross calls the collection Munro’s “most romantic, and riskiest book yet.” “Risky” was the word Munro used for it herself.
Barber sent Open Secrets to Gibson and Close in November 1993 and, early in 1994 after Munro had stopped to see Gibson in Toronto, they had an order for the stories. The first three – “Carried Away,” “A Real Life,” and “The Albanian Virgin” – had all grown from Munro’s researches into Minnie Rudd and Albania so she saw them as a group. As was usual in the making of Munro’s books, changes were made between the magazine and book publication versions. In one instance, Gibson pointed out that “some of our readers had found the story ‘Open Secrets’ a little too opaque for their taste.” Having heard this from others, Munro responded with this new paragraph characterizing Marian’s relation with her husband just after they have left their interview with Lawyer Stephens: “But Marian stopped him, she clamped a hand down on his. The way a mother might interrupt the carrying on of a simple-minded child – with a burst of abhorrence, a moment’s break in her tired-out love.” In “The Albanian Virgin” – a story that had been tentatively titled “Lottar” by the New Yorker and might have also been called “An Albanian Virgin” – Munro reinstated to the book a long passage about Nelson dropped from the serial, telling Close, “I want this ‘life with Nelson’ inserted here, as a present-tense forecast, before he actually appears. (It was this way originally, curse me).” She then wrote the insertion on the proof sheet. And she had the opening scene in the bootlegger’s restored to “Spaceships Have Landed.” The book was designed and set by Knopf but printed separately in Canada and the United States, McClelland & Stewart printing in its larger format, and, as usual, each publisher used separate dust jackets. Gibson and Munro departed from magic realism with this book’s dust jacket, opting for Colette, a “risky” original painting by Jenny Munro. Knopf chose a distant view of Niagara Falls with the book’s title interceding. McClelland & Stewart published its initial printing of 30,000 copies on September 24, Knopf its edition in September, too.
As with “The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry,” held out of any collection, here too Munro kept a recent story, “Hired Girl,” out of Open Secrets. It did not fit in with the rest. Published in the New Yorker in April 1994, the story is indeed quite different from those in the collection. Rather than being expansive and indeterminate, “Hired Girl” is reminiscent of Munro’s earlier work; it is based on her experience as a serving girl at a summer home on Georgian Bay when she wa
s in high school. There, the first-person narrator realizes she “didn’t have the grace or fortitude to be a servant” and her reading made her feel as if she “had just been rescued from my life. Words could become a burning-glass for me in those days, and no shame of my nature or condition could hold out among the flares of pleasure.” There is a certainty in this story’s epiphany, and in the narrator’s realization of her embarked self, that Munro apparently could no longer countenance; “Hired Girl” remained consigned to its single appearance in the New Yorker until it was included in The View from Castle Rock in 2006.
What Munro wanted in all of the eight stories she included in Open Secrets were new qualities of suggestion, deliberate suggestion without certainty. The risks she took and the effects she achieved were noticed at once. Characterizing Open Secrets for the New York Times bestseller list, an anonymous editor wrote that the book contains “bold, ambitious, risky short stories that never stop where stopping would be easy but go on to reach for the most expensive and difficult truths.” Always among the first to appear, the review in Publishers Weekly asserted that even though all the stories had appeared in serials, “to read them here is in many ways to read each anew. The careful ordering of these works, the casual reappearances of characters in various entries, the layering of time, the unity of place – all expand the depth of each entry, heightening the illusion that Munro’s fiction is as infinitely startling as life itself.” David Helwig in the Montreal Gazette wrote, “You never know, the stories keep saying, you just never know, and what you come to suspect might be almost unbearable. This is gossip informed by genius.”4
Writing in Quill & Quire, George Woodcock’s review put Munro’s career in long perspective; he remembers that Munro “was already much talked about in literary circles” when he met her during the 1950s, so much so that when it was published, Dance “seemed almost like a summing-up.” It was nothing of the sort, of course, since her books have continued to appear, he conceded. Open Secrets offers eight stories that are “close to novellas.… For what she is doing is taking the world of experience and discovering its inner light, so that, however mundane the situation, however tedious and sometimes repellent the characters, life stands before us, rendered into perfectly pitched prose, into preternatural observation, into some splendid creative synthesis, the product of a life of writing both modest and wholly exemplary.” In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani notes that many of these stories “are set in the distant past” and so “the volume as a whole feels somewhat more detached than earlier Munro collections.” Kakutani also notes the numerous abrupt shifts in characters’ lives here: “Given Ms. Munro’s consummate control of her craft, these often startling developments never come across as mere plot twists or gratuitous displays of authorial invention. Rather, they feel like wholly organic developments in her characters’ lives.” In her hands, “the ‘swift decision’ and ‘unforeseen intervention’ become metaphors for the unpredictability of life, the incalculable imagination of fate.”
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