Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Just as that happened, Gibson was writing a letter to Virginia Barber – his first, actually – that began “Mea culpa.” On June 9 a concerned Barber had written to him,

  I’m extremely unhappy with you and Macmillan. We are hearing from U.S. scouts about a book by Alice Munro called Who Do You Think You Are? which is to be published in the fall. We do not have a contract with you, and neither the American publisher nor I has heard that title. I’m sure you’ve discussed this with Alice, but she has an agent for good reasons. One of them is to have a central place where all the information about her work is collected. That’s this office, and never do I want a repetition of the past where her works were sold abroad without her knowledge or consent, where different houses were working at cross purposes for the same volume, and so on. Please send us the contract and some information.

  In his reply, Gibson was at pains to satisfy Barber on every point she raised and to describe in some detail just how he and Alice had been working together on the shape of Who Do You Think You Are? He wrote that the contract should be arriving momentarily if it had not already, that he and Alice had been on the phone a great deal, and that having weighed the various possible titles, they had decided on Who, the title Alice most wanted. He outlined the collection’s structure – it is just as Munro described in her second letter of May 19, save that “Accident” has been dropped – and he indicated that in “Who Do You Think You Are?” it is revealed, in “a coup de theatre,” that Janet is the author of the Rose stories. Thus for the dust jacket he and Alice had been “studying dozens of magic realist paintings in the hope of finding just the right one” to capture the Rose-Janet relation. Gibson ends, “I’m awfully sorry about my past sins of omission. Let’s be friends.”

  This incident is important less for the specifics of what happened than for what it portended. In writing Gibson as directly as she did and by the manner in which she presented herself, Barber was asserting her necessary presence in Munro’s affairs. Gibson readily acknowledged his understanding of her presence and indicated his willingness to establish an ongoing professional relation with her that respected her role. In retrospect, this exchange proved a formative moment in Munro’s career. Through the making of Who Do You Think You Are?/The Beggar Maid, Barber, Gibson, and Munro were establishing for the first time the professional relations that have served Munro’s work well in the succession of books she has published since, from The Moons of Jupiter in 1982 through Runaway in 2004. Gibson’s comment that he and Munro had been looking for “just the right” magic realist painting is indicative, too, since as her Canadian editor he has justifiably prided himself on the choice of appropriate artworks for her dust jackets. Given the initial Rose-Janet relation in Who, they first settled on a detail from Christopher Pratt’s Young Woman in a Slip, where the young woman is looking into a mirror. Rejecting it (though it was later used on the dust jacket of the Canadian edition of Moons), they ultimately opted for a detail of Ken Danby’s The Sunbather. Gibson’s covers, from this one to the painting of a dishevelled bed by Mary Pratt on the dust jacket of Runaway, have been capsule symbols of the elegant everyday found in Munro’s writing.

  In his mea-culpa letter, Gibson also remarks that “Alice, as you perhaps know, is a little worried about what she hears of Norton’s plans, and it would obviously be ideal for Norton and Macmillan to publish the same book. My hope is that when they see our galleys they will be immensely impressed and will wish to publish it.”32 Nothing of the kind happened, however. As Helen Hoy has written in the best account of the making of Who Do You Think You Are?/The Beggar Maid, “Norton was moving in another direction, making earnest attempts to turn the same material into a novel. As early as 20 June 1978 … the editors were assuming the publication of two quite different collections, with Sherry Huber resolute about excluding material extraneous to Rose’s story.” The difference between the two publishers, as Hoy details, was that Macmillan, unlike Norton, “was scrupulous not to pressure [Munro] to produce that more marketable commodity, a novel.” While true enough with regard to the structure, Macmillan’s deadline in late spring 1978 had pressed Munro into coming up with the two-part arrangement of Rose and Janet stories. With the book in production by mid-June, Munro’s work with Huber – separate, through the mails and the phone, extending over the summer – involved what Hoy called “her more leisurely mulling over of the single-heroine version she was working on for Norton.”

  Recalling that work when she was interviewed by Hoy in 1988, Huber said that she had seen Munro’s manuscript as connected short stories all along, that the other heroines – those who became Janet in the first Macmillan Who – were clearly Rose. She saw the question of whether the book was called a novel or short stories to be one of marketing. A book marketed as a novel in those days always sold considerably more than one presented as short stories. In notes dated June 11, 1978, Huber can be seen differentiating the Rose material (“Royal Beatings,” “Privilege,” “Half a Grapefruit,” “Characters,” “Wild Swans,” “Spelling,” and “The Beggar Maid”) from the way Macmillan was structuring those stories and the others. She set “Mischief” and “Providence” apart, as Janet stories, and then “Simon’s Luck” further apart with the notation that Munro thinks it is better in three sections. Huber was working on the manuscript over the summer, although her plan was to concentrate on it in September with the intention of getting it into production by the end of the month. After Munro reported that she was about to send another version of “Simon’s Luck” along, Huber responded that they would begin connecting the stories through their details when Munro was ready. She had not received galleys from Gibson, but she did not see that as relevant to the book they were working on. In fact, Huber saw her project as a wholly separate book.

  That separateness is borne out by the materials connected to it in the Calgary archives. On September 12 Huber wrote a long letter to Munro outlining her proposed organization, one she saw as a novel, she wrote, at least as much as Lives. The arrangement she envisioned corresponds to a manuscript table of contents of The Beggar Maid – that is its title there – with “chapters” listed as follows:

  One: Royal Beatings

  Two: Privilege

  Three: Half a Grapefruit

  Four: Characters

  Five: Nerve

  Six: The Beggar Maid

  Seven: Mischief

  Eight: Providence

  Nine: True Enemies

  Ten: Simon’s Luck

  Eleven: Spelling

  But for the exclusion of “Characters,” the addition of “Who Do You Think You Are?” and the reposition of “Spelling,” this arrangement anticipates the final book. (“Nerve” was Huber’s preferred title for “Wild Swans.”) In its final guise, The Beggar Maid had stories, of course, not “chapters.”

  The Norton version of The Beggar Maid was written in the first person and, as Huber edited the manuscript, that did not change. She did propose, and Munro accepted, large-scale shifts from present tense to past, and Huber paid particular attention to the endings of each story. The chapter listed as “True Enemies,” for instance, is actually the final scene of “The Beggar Maid” – when Rose happens upon Patrick in the Toronto airport years after their marriage ended and he makes a horrid face at her – moved back and treated as a separate unit. In another instance, Huber proposed the deletion of the last section of “Privilege,” the part beginning “The school changed with the war.” Throughout, she pressed to lessen the sense of stories ending so that the reader moved smoothly into the next chapter. To Hoy, Huber commented that Munro was easy about the changes to the ending. When she came to draft descriptive copy for the book’s dust jacket flap, Huber used language that made clear her novelistic strategy:

  The Beggar Maid is the story of Rose, in her journey from childhood to womanhood, a trip that takes her from an ingrown, rude life in a small town, to college, marriage, motherhood, and later a separate peace as an actress. It is an immense jou
rney, a painful journey, which Rose makes alone, armed with an unwavering, penetrating sense of other people’s foibles and sins. She is shy but ambitious, and gifted with a ribald, humorous sense of appreciation for the “luck” in her life.

  When Munro wrote to Gibson with the suggestion of “Who Do You Think You Are?” as a better title for the book, she also asked him, “What do you think of its revelation that Janet has written the Rose stories?” To Barber, he reported that he was quite happy with this revelation. But as the book proceeded through production over the summer and as Huber reshaped the Rose material she envisioned, it turned out that Munro was not satisfied with the revelation herself. After hearing that Huber liked the new “Simon’s Luck,” which she had sent in August, Munro wrote to her on September 16 that she “was in a frenzied state here, trying to get” Macmillan to pull Who “and print a Rose book with the new Simon’s Luck.” Writing to Huber again on the nineteenth, this time from the Macmillan offices in Toronto, Munro explained what she realized and what she did about it:

  After you said you liked Simon’s Luck I got more and more convinced that the series of Rose stories was the only way to do this book and that the Macmillan book was a dreadful awkward waste of good material and I couldn’t let them do it. (I couldn’t have reached this decision any earlier because I didn’t have Simon’s Luck.) Upshot of this was that I came down here and made my case. The book is already at the printers pub date Nov. 18th and they daren’t get it out any later. So, I said, what about leaving the first half – Royal Beatings to the Beggar Maid, intact, and reprinting the second half, as follows: Mischief, Providence, Simon’s Luck, Spelling, all in third person (Rose) to jibe with the first half. They said they could only do it with the same title (Who Do You Think You Are?) because the cover is designed and in production. Okay, I said, I’ll re-write Who Do You Think? as a Rose story, and I did, and its good. So here’s the book I asked them to do.

  Munro then listed the contents as subsequently published, with the notation “All Rose and in third person,” and continued, “This is like your book except that it omits Characters and adds Who Do You Think, and is in 3rd person.”33

  Munro’s admission to being in “a frenzied state” was probably written on the same afternoon, a Saturday, she called Gibson at home. He recalls returning from the store, bags in hand, and setting them on the counter to answer the phone. Munro announced herself, asked after him, and inquired as to the progress of Who Do You Think You Are? He replied, “It’s at the printer, it’s all done. You and I don’t have to do another thing, we should have finished copies before very long.” He recalls her replying, “ ‘Oh dear, because I’ve been looking at it and I think I want to change’ ” the Janet section. Then Gibson got into a “frenzied state” himself. Before they got off the phone, though, they agreed that on Monday morning he would stop the presses and Munro would come into the office to explain what she had in mind. Gibson recalled that those in charge at Macmillan “were very scared … because this was our main title for fall, and a huge part of our budget was based on that book getting out and selling,” so the prospect of a delay caused by pulling it off the presses was nothing they relished, especially since it was already coming out, in November, dangerously late in the season.

  As she makes clear in her second September 19 letter to Huber, Munro knew just what she was doing and was quite prepared to pay the costs involved. When she got into Toronto on the morning of the eighteenth, she met with Macmillan staff and explained what she wanted to do. The reorganization involved the omission of three stories (“Chaddeleys and Flemings: Connection,” “The Stone in the Field,” and “The Moons of Jupiter”), the revision of “Mischief,” “Providence,” and “Who Do You Think You Are?” into Rose stories, the moving of “Spelling” to a new position, and the addition of the new “Simon’s Luck,” a revised Rose story that was the cause of all the commotion after Munro had heard from Huber. At the meeting on the eighteenth it was decided that Gibson would read the new manuscript that morning and, at two o’clock, he would tell his colleagues “whether or not [he] thought it was worth going through all the trouble and expense.” While he was at work, the people in production would investigate the exact costs. He read the new manuscript – as far as it was, since there was further work to do – and decided that the changes were worth their trouble. So Macmillan set about the work involved to make, in effect, a new book. Reporting on these changes to his colleagues at Macmillan, knowing full well that what they were doing would cause a stir, Gibson wrote that “a very good manuscript” had been made a “very very good” manuscript.

  Continuing her explanation of all this to Huber, Munro wrote:

  As is, the cost of re-setting, with continual overtime to meet the same pub. date, is nearly $2500, which I have to pay. I am naturally unhappy about this but there was no other way I could get them to do it and I knew the book they were going to get out would do me harm. They said it would sell on my name (true) and they would not gain or make back their costs by making it a better book artistically. So if I wanted it, I had to pay. All this had to be decided at once because we had to get the altered mss. to the printers today if the schedule even with overtime is going to work. So I didn’t even call Ginger. I felt we had to go ahead. Worked all night and in an hour or two the new one will be ready to go.

  Very tough decision but I am relieved – They have a very handsome cover.

  Munro also mentions to Huber that at one point in the negotiations with Macmillan

  Norton’s doing the same book would virtually be a condition of their giving in to me – even at my expense, but I of course have nothing to do with that. I do like having Characters out and Who Do You Think in, otherwise I have no preference.… Anyway we’ve now got two books that are very close and I am immensely happier though poorer.

  Munro’s final sentence, doubtless quite heartfelt at the time, proved in later years to carry an ironic burden: “Never again will I write two versions of anything.”

  Munro’s estimate on the cost was high. The production person at Macmillan told Gibson the cost would be $2,210, but in the end they needed just 99 reset pages, not the 120 originally estimated, so the cost to Munro was $1,864.08. Macmillan was careful to take this from the second half of Munro’s advance, due on publication, rather than send her a bill. Internally, Gibson pointed out that the three omitted stories, already in type, amounted to a subsidy of Munro’s next book, something they should remember when they contracted for it. Macmillan published Who Do You Think You Are? on November 11. And on the Friday of the week that saw all the flurry of changes undertaken, Macmillan sent Munro a contract for Robert Laidlaw’s The McGregors for 1979 publication. Macmillan clearly knew what they had in Munro and, despite the hard-edged economic realities of publishing in Canada, acted in ways intended to make her welcome and happy.

  Looking back at this episode, Gibson put a positive spin on that process – “The printers were quite thrilled to be involved. This had never happened, and they realized they were part of literary history. Because they knew this was an important book they did amazing things. In the end we only lost about ten days in the whole process.” A good book, he added, “is going to be around for a long, long time.”34

  The large wrinkles in this book’s publication history were not yet over. Sometime in late September or early October Huber had left Norton. In October Gibson commented to Barber that he was “sorry to hear about Sherry’s departure, since ‘orphaned’ authors are so vulnerable to being over-looked.” Barber, for her part, was not prepared to have Munro’s book left adrift without an advocating editor at Norton. She approached Robert Gottlieb, the head editor at Alfred A. Knopf, who was among those in the original bidding. Given a fresh opportunity, he took it. Barber withdrew the book from Norton.

  By early November Barber was sending Munro the Knopf contract and, at the same time, soliciting her comments on Huber’s work with her at Norton, since the editor was then looking for another
job. Barber reminded Munro that she had told her Huber had made a “substantial contribution” to the book. As Huber was the person whose reaction to the revised “Simon’s Luck” prompted Munro to pull Who Do You Think You Are? from the press and reorganize it, that assessment might qualify as a radical understatement.

  At Knopf, Munro’s new editor was Ann Close. In her first letter to Munro, written two days after Who Do You Think You Are? was published, she announced that she herself might be leaving Knopf (“You seem to have run into a batch of peripatetic editors”) and addressed what they would do if she did. Close never did leave Knopf, though. With her arrival, the third member of Munro’s editorial book team was in place. Along with Barber and Gibson, Close has been overseeing the publication of Munro’s books ever since – the ninth such shared volume being Runaway. The Knopf contract for the book completed (and that with Norton cancelled), Close set out to see Munro’s first separate book publication in the United States on booksellers’ shelves. Gibson still hoped that Munro’s American publisher would use Macmillan’s version and sent Close and Gottlieb copies of Who to that end, offering to assist Knopf should they decide to offset from Macmillan’s book. Close was able to choose between it and the Norton first-person version (she also had Norton’s plans for the cover) and she also had at hand yet another rewrite of “Simon’s Luck.” By early December she and Gottlieb had decided to print for themselves, wanting a larger typeface than Macmillan’s and a more appealing overall design. By mid-January they, with Barber, had decided that The Beggar Maid was their preferred title; informing Munro about their thinking, Close wrote that “if you feel strongly (or even mildly) in favor of [the Canadian title], that is what we’ll use.” As she was deciding what to do with Munro, Close watched the book’s progress in Canada by means of the reviews Gibson provided. Acknowledging the books he sent and the help he offered in his first letter to her, Close commented that Munro “seems very happy with the success of the book in Canada. I only hope we can do as well for her next fall.”35