Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Writers do have responsibilities – all serious writers make a continual, and painful, and developing effort, to get as close as they can to what they see as reality – the shifting complex reality of human experience. A serious writer is always doing that, not attempting to please people, or flatter them, or offend them. The three books under consideration are all by serious writers. They are also moral books in that they deal with the question of how to live – what makes life not only bearable but what makes it honourable, how can people care for each other, how can we deal with hypocrisy and self-deception, how can we grow and learn and survive?

  Ultimately, the board voted to remove The Diviners from the high school but compromised on the other two books.

  After the meeting Munro received an encouraging letter from Laurence, who had written in response to the press coverage. Some of Munro’s comments in her reply are revelatory: “In a personal way this is all good for me – I have a problem wanting people to like me and it’s high time I got over it. I think it’s harder because I’m not an outsider living here, I have relatives[.] G.[erry] grew up here. Good people who were kind and friendly are now distant and disappointed.” And beyond her personal revelation about the pain she felt as an insider, a person from Huron County, she also writes that “a man came up to me after the meeting and said, ‘Your mother taught me in Sunday School. She would be ashamed of you.’ And it’s true. My mother burned Grapes of Wrath in the kitchen stove.” Recounting the same incident to another friend, Munro recognized that her writing reflected her own preference – that she rejected her mother’s piety and conventional notions, and she knew that she had become someone her mother would have been ashamed of.

  William French described Munro as one who “had the uncomfortable feeling of looking out at the somewhat hostile faces she usually encounters in more genial circumstances in the grocery store and on Clinton’s neighborly streets.”26 While there is no question but that Munro’s return to Huron County to live had a positive effect on her writing, it is evident equally that proximity to the people of the area exacted a personal price. Along with the evident slights of the people she knew, Munro received anonymous letters full of righteous indignation over her stand in defence of The Diviners and the other books. She had no illusions about how she was seen and, especially, how her work was viewed by many there. Her outspoken actions during the book-banning controversy embody the uneasy relationship. Into the 1980s, that relationship was particularly fraught. Munro’s luminous question, one she mentioned in her 1974 interview with Boyle and was just then making famous – Who do you think you are? – became a fact of her own daily life in Clinton. The low point occurred, certainly, in December 1981 when Barry Wenger, president and publisher of the Wingham Advance-Times, published an anti-Munro editorial entitled “A Genius of Sour Grapes.” He was expressing the indignation felt by many in Wingham over a newspaper piece syndicated across Canada by Wayne Grady called “Story Tellers to the World.” It seemed to attribute Grady’s sneering and condescending descriptions of Wingham and Lower Town to Munro herself. Given what had happened in public since her return, and given their reading of her fiction, many in the community were prepared to believe the characterizations as Munro’s. Looking back on these years in a 1982 profile in Books in Canada, Joyce Wayne entitled her piece “Huron County Blues.” Referring to Munro’s recent relations with Huron County generally and Wingham particularly, Wayne offers an apt summary, calling them “both the heartbreak and strength of her writer’s life.”27

  Canada’s Who Do You Think You Are?, America’s The Beggar Maid

  When she wrote Munro in December 1977 enclosing the New Yorker’s first-reading contract, Barber called it “a rare and lovely item” and chortled a bit, continuing, “Can’t wait to sound the news all over town, and drive book editors even more to distraction since they haven’t been able to get me to send them your manuscript.” Having had real success in selling Munro’s stories throughout 1977, Barber’s attentions gradually shifted to Munro’s next book. During that year, too, Barber sorted through her author’s existing book contracts, both so that she understood them herself and also in order to investigate new paperback possibilities. She needed to understand Canadian publishing better, its shape and detail, and to establish contacts there. Concurrent with those first stories Barber had met with John Savage and Robin Brass from McGraw-Hill Ryerson and, in May 1977, she made a trip to Canada, coming back “with a much clearer sense of houses and editors” than she had had before. She wrote this to Bella Pomer, one of Gibson’s colleagues at Macmillan, who had given her “helpful information … about who’s who and what’s what in Canadian publishing.” Barber knew that there was an editor at Macmillan whom Munro liked, though she did not then know his name, and she also knew that the house had promised her that it would publish Robert Laidlaw’s novel. During that summer, too, Barber heard from John Pearce, senior editor at Clarke, Irwin in Toronto, who called her “to ask about Alice Munro’s publishing future and to express [his] considerable enthusiasm for her work.” He came to see her in November (she thought he might be the Canadian editor Munro liked), and Robin Brass also wrote saying that McGraw-Hill Ryerson was “as keen as ever.”28

  While Canadian houses were showing great eagerness about Munro, her next book was taking shape. By early October 1977 Barber wrote Munro formulating a sort of plan:

  Let’s think of a title for the short story collection. And don’t you think the book should have two sections – the first section 5 Flo and Rose stories (“Royal Beatings” Privilege, Half a G., Wild Swans and Spelling) and then, Accident, Beggar Maid, Mischief, Providence and Simon’s Luck? Mr. Black too? How would you like the stories ordered. Give this a little time, and then you may put this out of your mind for a while, if that pleases you. If Simon’s Luck is now three stories, you have more than enough for a collection, and could remove some. Or we could enlist the aid of an editor.

  Barber was, as usual, on top of things; she had taken a considered look at both the body of Munro’s work and her more recent stories. As good as her word, Barber was nudging Munro to the next step and was doing so in a supportive and direct way: indeed, her suggestion of a two-part structure for Who Do You Think You Are? was the direction Munro initially followed.

  For his part, Douglas Gibson at Macmillan had not slackened in his pursuit of Munro. After apparently considering her father’s manuscript for some time, he told her in April 1977 that Macmillan had decided to publish it. He was not sure just when they would bring it out, since that was dependent on his own busy schedule and he wanted to edit it himself. “I know how much the publication of this book means to you, and as you and I agree, you ought not to spend time revising it, but should be working on your short stories.” Arrangements regarding The McGregors remained in limbo until January 1978, when Munro wrote to Gibson asking for a progress report. Her stepmother, Mary Etta Laidlaw, was quite ill and had been asking her about it. Munro hoped “to give her some news, even if she may not get to see it.” Gibson replied that he would work to get the book out that fall, promising a contract for it soon. He then continued: “I have been deliberately staying out of your way for some time, since I don’t want to pester you with repeated offers of a contract. In the meantime, of course, I’ve been keeping an approving eye on your work: in ‘The New Yorker’, on ‘The Immigrants’ [on CBC-TV], and most recently in connection with the Australian prize.” Congratulating her, he then wondered if she is “now close to having a book-length collection and therefore to drawing up a contract with us. I can think of no other author I would rather have on Macmillan’s list.” Gibson also sent her a copy of a book they had just published called Remembering the Farm because it contained a story that “instantly struck me as an Alice Munro story in miniature.” Though he did not say so, that book also contains photographs by Peter D’Angelo.

  Gibson’s wooing strategy was not without critique within Macmillan. A few days after Gibson wrote this letter to
Munro, Robert J. Stuart, vice-president of trade books, wrote him an internal memo critical of the decision to publish The McGregors, one he himself had acquiesced to. His memo is within a particular context that Stuart is quite explicit about: “I know how badly you want Alice Munro on the Macmillan list, as do all of us in the division.” He allows that the publication of the book might “make some difference to Alice although, in retrospect, we are going about getting her in the wrong way. We should attract her to this house by our ability to edit her work, and sell and promote her books, not that of her father.” Stuart is disgruntled over the time Gibson would need to edit the Laidlaw book, its dim prospect for sales, and what he saw as a breakdown in Macmillan’s internal procedures for having manuscripts evaluated by persons other than the sponsoring editor.29

  Whatever Stuart’s misgivings, Gibson’s approach worked. When she replied to his letter about placing The McGregors on the Macmillan fall list, Munro told him that she “had a bunch of stories on hand now, though I would still like a couple more for a collection.” She reiterated that McGraw-Hill Ryerson wanted to hold her to the next-manuscript clause in her contract for Something, but added, “I don’t think they should publish me and my agent knows this. I have told her that I would like Macmillan for my Canadian publisher, and that I have talked to you informally about this.” For her part, Barber sent Gibson Munro’s manuscript, entitled The Beggar Maid, on March 8. It contained a section of five “Rose” stories – “Royal Beatings,” “Privilege,” “Half a Grapefruit,” “Wild Swans,” and “Spelling.” “Characters,” the new title of “Pleistocene,” was there too, but Barber indicated that it might be dropped. This section was followed by “Accident” and “Simon’s Luck” (each of these titles was struck out, Barber promising a revision of the latter “which pulls the three parts together with a new ending”); then “Chaddeleys and Flemings,” “The Moons of Jupiter,” “Mischief,” “Providence,” and “The Beggar Maid.” The last three were then about three different characters rather than a single person. In keeping with Stuart’s preferred practice, the manuscript was read at Macmillan by Charlotte Weiss, who agreed with Gibson that it was excellent. By April 10 Gibson was formally authorized to make an offer for the book. He did, and it was accepted. Munro received a $25,000 advance against royalties on Canadian sales, with royalties at 10 per cent for the first 5,000 copies, 12.5 per cent up to 10,000, and 15 per cent after that. There was a straight 10 per cent on the Macmillan-New American Library paperback that would follow the hardcover edition. Macmillan’s share of the advance was $15,000, NAL’s $10,000.

  By the end of April Gibson wrote Munro a three-page “Welcome to Macmillan” letter. “I know that you will be happy here, and promise that any disappointments that may be in the future will not be for a lack of care.” Responding to the manuscript as a whole, he called it “marvelous,” and predicted that “its publication will be without question the major literary event in Canada this year.” He then suggests a new title taken from something one of the characters says in “Providence”; they might call the book True Lies. He also suggests that the Rose stories not be grouped together but rather arranged throughout the volume; and he wonders whether Munro would consider breaking “Chaddeleys and Flemings” in two, just at the point where the narrator throws the plate with lemon meringue pie at her husband.

  Having read the manuscript and orally agreed on a contract for it, Gibson was brimming with its possibilities. He was looking to a chance to sit down with Munro and go over it, knowing that she was “still hard at work, obsessively polishing away.” That was indeed her habit, but with this book Munro would make changes continually during its march toward publication, seemingly unable to leave it alone. Writing Gibson little more than a week after his welcoming letter to Munro, Barber told him that “Alice has now put the whole book in first person, removed three stories (Chaddeleys and Flemings, Moons of Jupiter and Accident) and rewritten Simon’s Luck as the last of the adult Rose stories (only one woman, Rose, and Simon).” But for the first person and the addition of “Who Do You Think You Are?” the book as Barber described here is close to the one published, but there were many more changes to consider yet. Within the month, for instance, “The Moons of Jupiter” was back in. She closed her letter with an enticement: “If you’ll call me one day next week, I’ll tell you about the U.S. situation; it’s looking extremely good.”30

  With Macmillan settled as her Canadian publisher, focus shifted to the American scene. And having prepared the ground, Barber was ready for serious negotiations with interested houses. Barber was keen on finding the right publisher and particularly the right editor, one who would work toward establishing Munro’s reputation in ways compatible with what she herself had already accomplished through magazines. While numerous editors (including Kate Medina at Doubleday) and several publishers were interested in the book, Knopf, Norton, and Viking emerged as the leading bidders. Munro went down to New York to meet them. She and Barber accepted a bid from Norton of a fifteen-thousand-dollar advance. Barber has said that there is “a lot of work for an editor to do in house. They have to work with the marketing department, with publicity and promotion, and they have to be the in-house advocate of the book.” This, she knew, was especially necessary with a collection of stories, one she was seeing as a first collection in the United States, McGraw-Hill’s Dance notwithstanding. Sherry Huber, an editor at Norton, was keen on Munro’s work; she seemed to fill the bill. The contract with Norton signed by mid-May, Munro sent Huber the manuscript as it was then.

  Having looked at the manuscript during the bidding process, Huber had already talked to Munro about the Norton book’s organization. Munro wrote Huber two letters on May 19 as she was sending the manuscript. The longer one, probably written first, outlines the organizational possibilities as Munro saw them. She had done all the stories in the first person and, reading them over after getting them back from her typist, she concluded that “the idea of connections did not work. It would make the book seem like a failed, fallen-apart novel. It has to stand as separate stories.”

  Who Do You Think You Are?/The Beggar Maid unquestionably has the most complex, and fraught, publication history of any of Munro’s books. At the heart of the matter was the tension between a novel and a collection of stories, and then over the exact shape of the collection. Throughout this shaping – which continued throughout 1978 – a group of six stories the book ultimately contained were consistently seen as being about a single character, Rose, who emerged as the focus of the finished book. (These were “Royal Beatings,” “Privilege,” “Half a Grapefruit,” “Wild Swans,” “The Beggar Maid,” and “Spelling.”) Another story, “Characters,” was about Rose but dropped. Six other stories (or seven since “Chaddeleys and Flemings” was, as Gibson had suggested, divided into two) were in play. As Munro indicated to Huber, she experimented in them with first- and third-person voice, trying each at various times, but the real question regarding these latter stories was whether they were about Rose or some other character, usually Janet, a writer (though at the suggestion of the New Yorker when “The Moons of Jupiter” was published there, she also appeared as a painter). Writing to Huber in her first May 19 letter, Munro further weighed various means of arranging the stories and arrived at “a solution very close to what you suggested in the first place. That is, a Rose section with all the stories that go so well together about Rose: Royal Beatings, Privilege, Grapefruit, Swans, Spelling, Beggar Maid (the position of Spelling is a bit of a problem). Then, a Janet section, with Chaddeleys & Flemings, Mischief, Providence, Moons of Jupiter and a story I’m just finishing now, called ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ This makes two almost equal parts.” Macmillan wanted to use “Accident” set between the two sections and leave out “Simon’s Luck.”

  When she wrote Huber again on May 19 she sets the Macmillan “Rose and Janet” structure out on a page, schematically indicating arrangement: first Rose stories in third person (arranged as above the
first time), “Accident” in the middle, then the first-person Janet stories (“Chaddeleys and Flemings,” “Who Do You Think You Are?” “Mischief,” “Providence,” “Moons of Jupiter”). Munro also tells her that she has sent her a revised version of “Simon’s Luck,” now in the first person but, after she had sent it, she decided to redo it as a Rose story in third person and so encloses it, asking Huber to copy it and send a copy to Gibson, giving her his address. At that point she saw it as replacing “Accident.”31

  Apart from Munro’s inborn striving to achieve a satisfactory form for each of her stories, what all these changes indicate is a writer unusually willing to experiment with the shape her book is taking. She was also listening and responding to her editors’ reactions. Because she was dealing with two editors, each of whom was responding differently to the book’s various possibilities, Munro was moving throughout 1978 toward two very different books.

  For its part, Macmillan pressed ahead. At Munro’s suggestion, Gibson had arranged for Audrey Coffin, by then retired from McGraw-Hill Ryerson but still living near Toronto, to copy-edit Munro’s book. Gibson’s suggestion of “True Lies” as a title to replace “The Beggar Maid” did not succeed with Munro; for a time it looked as if the book would be called “Rose and Janet.” That title was met within Macmillan by general “disgust and dismay”; one person there called it “about as exciting as toad shit on a warm rock.” Following Munro’s own suggestion, they decided on Who Do You Think You Are? She characterized that story, which she had just completed, as “slight but important” and suggested further that, as the title story, it “could come at the very end.” Coffin delivered the copy-edited manuscript at the end of the first week of June. Within a week Who Do You Think You Are? went into Canadian production.