Barber is amused because the payment schedule “listed is less than you received previously. However, for the next story The New Yorker buys, they will pay you more than you received previously.” Signing the first-reading agreement brought a payment of just one hundred dollars. Although the money involved from the New Yorker was very real, much more than writers could obtain elsewhere, the importance of the contract to Munro and her career is found in McGrath’s penultimate sentence: “The point of all this is simply that we feel your writing is very special, and we want to express our gratitude to you for letting us see it.” Recalling this decision early in 2003, McGrath indicated that a first-reading agreement made little more than a year after he and his colleagues first took up Munro’s stories made her work special indeed, quite exceptional. It normally took a person considerably more time to get to that point.22
What Barber called the New Yorker’s “amusing hauteur” under William Shawn bears comment since similar formalities may be inferred in McGrath’s constructions (“we want to express our gratitude” or, when he first wrote, “we would be honored if you will let us publish” “Royal Beatings”). Writing Munro then, McGrath was establishing a relationship with her that he already had with other writers, relationships enacted largely through the mails and over the telephone, in which he had to both explain the New Yorker’s ways and maintain the writer’s control and cooperation as the process moved toward publication. Given the magazine’s prominence – especially since the 1970s was one of its most prosperous decades – it could well afford to buy the best. At the same time, and this was a peculiarity that began under Harold Ross but was enshrined under Shawn, the writer’s agreement to whatever changes were proposed was paramount. Thus authors could, and occasionally did, refuse to go along with changes and pull their work. So McGrath’s formalities were not nearly the pose they might sound, nor were they disingenuous. McGrath knew he had the power brought by a big cheque and he wielded it carefully.
The results for Alice Munro herself were enormous, certainly. Without question, getting into the New Yorker, causing a buzz in New York publishing circles, and receiving a first-reading agreement within just a year’s time, all moved her career to another level. However, the real effect of the new arrangement was on her work itself. During the 1950s and 1960s Robert Weaver and his colleagues at the CBC and at the Tamarack Review responded to, and appreciated, the stories she sent. In Earle Toppings and Audrey Coffin at Ryerson she had sympathetic editors who responded to, encouraged, and to some degree prodded her. With John Metcalf it was mostly commiseration, although his frequent comments on her published work were a real tonic. But in Barber and, by extension, McGrath and the rest of the fiction editors at the New Yorker, and editors at other magazines too, Munro had a group of people who were responding to, encouraging her and, often, pushing toward a revision. Barber, of course, had a vested interest in Munro’s success; as her author succeeded, so did she. But in reading the correspondence, weighing the questions and answers it contains, and inferring the telephone conversations that accompanied those letters, one sees that it is clear that Barber and Munro formed a partnership very quickly. Both of them were engaged in and stimulated by the contacts Barber had made in New York.
Yet for Munro’s art and the growth of her career, these new arrangements were much more than publication by the continent’s leading venue for short fiction. Her return to Huron County and the renewal of her imaginative connections there meant that the stories Munro wrote during 1976 were imbued with a more immediate sensibility and also a different imaginative relation to her subject matter than she had previously displayed. In the stories she intended for Who Do You Think You Are? (including those ultimately held out of that volume to await the next collection, The Moons of Jupiter), Munro can be seen to be looking back to childhood, but reconnecting to the continuity of life itself in Huron County from her middle-aged perspective. She still remembered her discovery of the complexities of her home (“Connection. That was what it was all about”) but those memories were now more distant. While this balancing of a child’s perspective with the narrating adult’s sensibility is also evident in many of the stories in Dance and Lives, there is a qualitative difference, a new-found complexity, in the stories Munro wrote after she returned to Huron County. The home she wrote about from British Columbia, she recalled, “was just like an enchanted land of your childhood.” But the Huron County she had returned to and began seeing anew in 1975 was harsher and a place she saw in a more sociological way. With Huron’s people, Huron’s culture, Huron’s life staring her full in the face – no longer being remembered over time and distance – Munro saw social differences even more clearly, resulting in greater complexity from Who on. That book felt in some ways like Lives, but its longer perspective and its much more complex composition suggest a writer finding a new relation to her material. Back in Huron County, Munro was literally “a writer in the midst of what was, so to speak, [her] material,” as she wrote in the unpublished proof version of “Who Do You Think You Are?” Munro had never really been in that position before. Thus there is both a perceptual shift and a greater social complexity in the stories Munro wrote from 1976 on. As McGrath commented when he first wrote her regarding “Royal Beatings,” the narrative “seems to work the way that memory works.”
Always an intuitive writer, Munro proceeded as she always had in Clinton. She tried things; sometimes they worked, sometimes they did not. The Rose and Janet stories worked. She attempted stories focused on a middle-aged couple living in the house the man grew up in with the man’s mother. (“Sounds like Mrs. Fremlin, doesn’t it?” Munro commented, hearing of these, having forgotten them.) They did not work. Once she sent stories off to Barber the response was real, and relatively fast; Barber would comment but promptly got them off to the New Yorker, which, for its part, also responded with dispatch. At times too, when it was judicious to wait before submitting a story, Barber did. Thus as she worked on the stories that became Who and, as well, four of the stories in Moons, Munro was receiving more professional response to her work than she ever had before. And because she was also trying old material in new ways, undertaking new subjects, and revelling in the fact of a new, yet renewed, relation to her home, the period 1976 through the mid-1980s is an especially rich one in her career.
When McGrath returned a story, he never did so without summarizing the discussion it had occasioned among the editors. The importance of this relation to Munro’s art may be seen in the case of “Simon’s Luck,” a story that she wrote initially as a larger, more complicated narrative than the version eventually published. She continued to wonder over, revise, and tinker with it. A new version of this story helped spark her decision to pull Who from the presses and reorganize it, and she was considering a new version for the American edition even after Who had been published in Canada. It deals with Simon, an inscrutable character whose personal history Munro had heard from a faculty member at Western, and focuses on his relations with three different women. In August 1977 McGrath had returned a long version of “Simon’s Luck” with a rejection letter. He reported that it “had many readings here, and while we all thought it was brilliantly written, and full of life and intelligence, in the end we agreed that somehow it didn’t quite work.” After commenting on the story’s focus, Simon himself, his attractiveness to women, McGrath concluded:
I’m sorry to go on so long, and if I sound critical I don’t mean to. The truth is that we all greatly admired this story, and feel very unhappy about sending it back. In fact, we would be more than happy to reconsider it if you decided to revise it. It’s only fair for me to say, though, that for some reason (maybe that editors never really know what they want) resubmissions rarely work out here, and I also think that if you fixed the beginning a little you could sell this in a minute somewhere else. This is all up to you and Ginger, and whatever you decide is fine with us. I really am sorry, and one thing that makes me feel better is knowing that you’re work
ing on another story.
Despite the warning here – Munro had revised two stories and re-submitted them (unsuccessfully) before this – she revised the story, giving a separate section to each woman. A manuscript of this sectioned version is in Calgary (thirty-three legal typescript pages, double-spaced). Here the women are Emily, Sheila, and Angela, each of whom breaks with Simon. Angela does so most dramatically – she runs an errand to the store but decides to drive Simon’s car to a train station, where she buys a ticket and boards the transcontinental train, returning the keys by mail. The Emily section was the section published in Who, with Emily’s name changed to Rose; relocated, some of Sheila’s and Angela’s situations and actions inform the character of Lydia in “Dulse.” As Munro reported to Gibson, she did not waste much of her writing.
McGrath and his colleagues at the New Yorker came to the same conclusion about the revised “Simon’s Luck,” for he wrote to Barber in December with the comment that “the three sections do stand by themselves, I guess, but they seem skimpy somehow – compared with the fullness of the first version, anyway – and in these separate stories Simon seems as enigmatic as ever; at times he hardly seems to be there at all.” He added, “What I do know is that there’s a lot of wonderful writing here, and I hate to lose it. We all do.” Even in the face of this second rejection, Barber and Munro continued to press the story since the New Yorker saw, and again rejected, the Sheila section as a separate story. “Emily,” which became “Simon’s Luck” in Who (after Munro tried shifting it to first person), appeared in Viva in 1978.23
When “Royal Beatings” appeared in the New Yorker in March 1977, John Metcalf wrote Munro congratulating her on its appearance. In her return letter Munro told him about the magazine’s back-and-forth editing process, its pickiness, and especially its prudery, which surprised her. “Everyone at the New Yorker is in thrall to some deity upstairs called Mr. Shawn. ‘We doubt very much if this will get by Mr. Shawn,’ they say sadly. They have not been so hard on ‘The Beggar Maid,’ the second story they took.” Munro then moves on to other topics.
However long she may have tried to get her stories into the New Yorker, like most people Munro was unaware of Mr. Shawn’s position atop the magazine until she had to deal with his policies through McGrath. His task was to carry the discussion to Shawn, to win the point over pickled arseholes and snot but lose over the bathroom noises, which were duly reinstated in the book. Her job, as Barber would continue to tell Munro, was to “write well.” So Munro did. And through the offices of Ginger Barber and Chip McGrath – for so they were to one another very quickly, despite initial formalities – the literary world outside of Canada began to take notice.
“Huron County Blues”
Canada certainly noticed Munro being noticed. In a March 1977 piece on Munro and Richler in the Globe and Mail, William French called attention to “Royal Beatings” in the previous week’s New Yorker, offering a progress report on her current writing. Like Richler, whose novel-in-progress had been excerpted in Saturday Night, Munro was still “on good terms” with her typewriter. Since her last book, French reports, Munro “has remarried – her new husband is Gerald Fremlin – and settled down in the small town of Clinton, Ont., about 60 miles north of London. ‘I like small town life,’ she explained when I called her the other day. ‘We go for long walks and do a lot of cross-country skiing.’ Clinton is in the snowbelt, but Munro is accustomed to rigorous winters. Wingham, where she grew up and which has provided the setting for many of her stories – the fictional version is called Jubilee – is only 20 miles from Clinton.”24
Munro was settling back into life in Huron County, Ontario, and through such published pieces as this, people who knew and admired her work became aware of her return. Munro and Fremlin gradually began to recognize that their life together would be in Clinton, a shared life in a small town where they both felt comfortable. She wrote, her already major reputation in Canada grew through her New Yorker appearances, and life settled into a regular seasonal pattern. Andrea came east for summers, her older sisters visited as they could, Munro and Fremlin skied in winter, walked in the spring, summer, and fall, and drove about the countryside exploring and rediscovering – it is not by chance that both “Working for a Living” and “What Do You Want to Know For?” begin with images of Munro and Fremlin on the road, driving about, noticing something. As Munro has said, such drives have long been one of their recreations.
Munro was not able to settle back into Huron County anonymously nor, given her reputation and the increasing number of requests that reputation brought, was she able to stay in Clinton as much as she would have preferred. By 1977 her career had begun its transformation from famous Canadian writer to much-admired international writer to watch. She accepted occasional invitations to participate in public events of one sort or another, and during 1977 she continued to work on the stories that went into Who and some into The Moons of Jupiter. At the same time, she was involved in other activities. In the spring Munro served, along with Margaret Laurence and Mordecai Richler, on the committee that selected the 1976 Governor General’s Award for Fiction. The award went to Marian Engel’s Bear, a controversial choice and one in which Munro differed from the committee’s other members. Their discussions led to some friction with Laurence, who wanted the decision to be unanimous; as a result, Munro withdrew from the committee for the next year’s award. Other recognitions came her way as well. Her story “Accident,” which was first published in Toronto Life, received the National Magazine Gold Medal; she received a Silver Jubilee Medal from the Queen commemorating the anniversary of the coronation; and early in January 1978 it was announced that Munro had won the 1977 Canada-Australia Literary Prize. She was its second winner, the first Canadian. Intended to make writers from one country better known in the other, it involved a tour of Australia that Munro undertook during the spring of 1979.25
Munro’s move back to Huron County came with a price. In 1978 she spoke out against attempts to ban three books from the grade thirteen English curriculum in Huron County high schools. They were Laurence’s The Diviners, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. She was publicly outspoken and drew considerable press attention to herself as she helped lead the opposition of the Writers’ Union against this attempt. Speaking in London in late May to the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English, she argued, according to a news report in the Montreal Star, that “Canadian writers must fight a conservative backlash that has forced some books from high school reading lists [as] obscene or pornographic.” At the annual Writers’ Union meeting, she was appointed to its committee charged with fighting “this strong uprising of people who feel there has been too much permissiveness.” Though such advocacy was uncharacteristic, Munro’s belief in the need to undertake this work was deep and unwavering. She knew of it first-hand.
In early 1976, Lives of Girls and Women had been singled out for banning on “moral” grounds by the principal of a Peterborough, Ontario, high school at the same time as The Diviners was removed from the Grade 13 curriculum by the Lakefield school board just north of Peterborough. (Laurence lived in Lakefield then.) The two writers were linked by these actions, and they commiserated by mail, Munro addressing Laurence as “F.F.P.,” “that’s famous fellow pornographer.” In the same letter Munro added that she had been “getting the blast in Wingham for ages” and, though she was used to it, she regretted it for her father’s and stepmother’s sakes. Hence when The Diviners was attacked again in spring 1978, Munro was in no joking mood. Throughout, she was an outspoken defender of the targeted novels and, more particularly, of the integrity of teenagers as thinking persons, and of their right to read what they chose to read, just as she had done herself. She understood that there are always plenty of people made uncomfortable by the literary depiction of life as it is and by the fact that literature both communicates ideas and makes people think.
Munro’s position in this
debate was especially precarious since she was living among the very people who were bent on banning the three books. A motion to that effect had come before the Huron County school board. Votes had been taken in the townships, and Munro’s native Turnberry Township had voted 35–1 in favour of the ban. A public meeting organized by opponents to the ban was held in Clinton on June 13. In support of the local English teachers, the Writers’ Union sent along three representatives, William French reported in the Globe and Mail, “vice-president June Callwood, children’s writer Janet Lunn, and Alice Munro, who lives in the eye of the storm in Clinton.” Almost five hundred people attended. French, who reported on the meeting, also noted that “the five people on the platform made some low-key remarks in defence of freedom and the three books specifically, trying not to offend or inflame.” Munro asserted that “the tradition of propriety in literature is not an ancient one but a fairly recent one” and then went on to illustrate this “from a book” she valued very much. “In a fairly short space this tells about 1) an incestuous rape 2) a case of extreme drunken-ness and double incest, 3) a daughter-in-law who disguises herself as a prostitute to trick her father-in-law, and finally, about a king who falls in love with a beautiful married woman he sees bathing on the roof-top, seduces her, tries to trick her husband into thinking he – the husband – is the father of her expected child, then when this fails sends the husband back into the thick of the battle to be killed.” Reporting on this part of her speech, the reporter from the Clinton News-Record wrote that “Munro’s comparison of the alleged pornographic materials in the novels to material in The Bible sparked an audience reaction that began to resemble a faith healing session.” Once she was finished with King David and Bathsheba, Munro continued:
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