Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Gibson had 5,000 copies of the tribute printed. It contained Munro’s Vintage introduction, retitled “About This Book” and signed by Munro, Gibson’s “Alice Munro’s Selected Stories – A Publisher’s View,” a biographical note, selections of reviews of Selected Stories in three sections (Britain, the United States, Canada), an excerpt from a Gzowski interview, and a “Garland of Praise for Alice Munro’s Previous Work.” When Gibson sent Munro copies of the tribute, he explained that the “plan is [that booksellers] will display them on the counters and give them to local book clubs – and that everyone who has not yet bought the Selected Stories (which includes quite a fair share of Canada’s population) will feel ashamed of themselves and rush out and buy the book.” Quite clearly a publisher making a case to his author about sales efforts (“So we are doing all we can,” he writes), Gibson also reminds her (and Barber too, since she got a copy) that McClelland & Stewart was “right to be concerned … that the book would do better in the U.S. and the U.K., since your Canadian followers were so loyal that most of them already had all of your work.”

  Gibson also comments here that he would be unable to attend the upcoming award ceremony in Washington but that Avie Bennett would be there to represent McClelland & Stewart at the major event where Munro was the first non-American to receive the PEN-Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. This prize had already been given to Saul Bellow, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Updike, among others, in each case celebrating a body of work. The PEN-Malamud was presented to Munro in Washington at the Folger Shakespeare Library on December 12, where she also read. Speaking at the presentation ceremony, Canadian broadcaster Robert MacNeil offered this evaluation:

  Her stories feel like novels. You come away knowing as much about her people as you might in a novel, more than many novels, after just twenty-five pages.… Her observation of human nature, first practiced so tellingly on her home ground, but refined over four decades, has reached levels of universal application, in which understanding of the human heart is more important than any geographical peculiarities.

  As such an award and such public assessments suggest, Munro’s work continued to attract even more adulation. At home, she had opted not to enter the Selected Stories for consideration for the Governor General’s Award just as, by serving on its first selection committee, she had avoided the first Giller for Open Secrets, to Gibson’s dismay. But that book received the W.H. Smith Award in Britain as the best book of the year and, in Washington, the PEN-Malamud came for the whole of her work. As the 1990s passed, such foreign awards from abroad were starting to become a regular feature of Munro’s career.

  PEN figured in Munro’s writing at about this time, too, in that she contributed two essays, “What Do You Want to Know For?” and “Changing Places,” to PEN Canada volumes published in support of the Canadian Centre of International PEN. Each essay is revelatory: the latter is an investigation of the Laidlaws’ pioneering history. The former, in effect, is an elaboration of something the narrator in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” says after she hears her father’s explanation of “how the Great Lakes came to be”: “The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquility.” In it, Munro reveals her knowledge of glacial deposition and geological time in concert with a sense of the time passed since Huron County’s first settlement and a sense of her own time. Recounting an investigation she and Fremlin undertook to learn about a crypt they spotted in a cemetery on one of their drives to explore their area, Munro interweaves it with the account of her own brush with a possible cancer in her breast. Contemplating this possibility, at one point she writes, “I am over sixty. My death would not be a calamity. Not in comparison with the death of a young mother, a family wage-earner, a child.”

  Though very real at the time – in 1993 – this possibility proved groundless. But the essay proved prescient: the later 1990s saw Munro increasingly dealing with other health problems, with her heart in particular. These personal contexts make “What Do You Want to Know For?” all the more revealing, but it is the essay’s final paragraph that captures Munro’s sense of life ongoing: “The corn in tassel, the height of summer passing, time opening out with room for ordinary anxieties, weariness, tiffs, triviality. No more hard edges, or blamelessness, or fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of bees. Back where nothing seems to be happening, beyond the change of seasons.”10

  “And there is the boat, still, waiting by the bank of Maitland River”: New Editors at the New Yorker, The Love of a Good Woman

  Just after “The Albanian Virgin” had appeared in the New Yorker in July 1994, Daniel Menaker left the magazine to become senior editor at Random House. (One of the first projects he edited was the runaway political bestseller Primary Colors, by “Anonymous,” a book that features a character who loves Alice Munro’s writing.) Menaker’s departure was followed in November with the announcement that Charles McGrath would also leave in March 1995 to become editor of the New York Times Book Review. Since she had replaced Robert Gottlieb as editor in 1992, Tina Brown had effected wholesale changes at the New Yorker – the authors’ party, with its glitz, its buzz, and its stylish photographs typified Brown’s approach. But beyond such events, there were more fundamental changes. One of the most-remarked was her decision to change the magazine’s approach to fiction: she cut the number of stories published by about half, moved them back in the presentation (toward what staffers call “the back of the book”), and made fiction compete with non-fiction in a way it had not previously.

  McGrath was deputy editor and had been head of the fiction department for many years before that. When he left, Brown decided to replace him with Bill Buford, an American who had lived in England and edited Granta since 1978. Under his direction, it had changed from a small, nondescript publication into a respected quarterly of fiction and non-fiction. Brown gave Buford the new title of fiction and literary editor, one that defined a new relation between writer and editor at the magazine. No longer would individual editors directly acquire and then edit the stories of the writers they dealt with. Buford handled the acquiring and oversaw the work of other editors while they worked directly with authors; that is, Brown had Buford supervise the fiction department in a way that had not been done before. His approach was to put his own stamp on the magazine’s fiction rather than proceed by consensus; Buford was to be more than first among equals. After Buford arrived, Brown in typical fashion arranged a luncheon to present him to the New York literary establishment. In June 1995 Buford addressed a room at a trendy restaurant filled with “writers, publishers, agents and editors,” as one account described the scene, naming some of the famed literati present that day. Buford, so presented, was offered by Brown as one who, in fact, had been made “suddenly one of the most important tastemakers in the country.”

  Much of this happened at the New Yorker during Munro’s writing time – that is, after she had completed Open Secrets and before the stories that became The Love of a Good Woman were ready for consideration. While Buford acquired Munro’s stories for the magazine between 1996 and 2002, and certainly helped shape her stories for publication while he headed the fiction department, her primary editors at the New Yorker were Alice Quinn from 1996 to 2000 and, since then, Deborah Treisman. Quinn, who was an editor at Knopf when she first ran across Munro’s work in 1977, joined the New Yorker in 1987 and later succeeded Howard Moss as its poetry editor. The first Munro story Quinn handled was “The Love of a Good Woman,” one Barber submitted during the spring of 1996 just after Munro had returned from Ireland and had rewritten the story.

  Buford may have seen the story before Barber wrote him in early May telling him that Munro had not been able to turn the three-part “Love” into stories. She enclosed a copy of it in any case, and also passed along Munro’s apology that the story is so “old-fashioned.” By the end of May Barber reported to Gibson that the New Yorker did want to buy “Love,” but the cuts they had proposed would change the
story considerably. So Alice and she were talking. In August Buford wrote Munro directly, indicating his admiration for the story, explaining that at first he thought “a single, substantial cut” would work, but indicating that even with it the story would still be seventeen thousand words long. His preference was to run it in a single issue, but the difficulty was finding the space. He also suggested running the story in two instalments, as they had when “A Queer Streak” was published in Granta. Responding, Munro, Barber, and Close had discussions about ways to handle the story, but ultimately they decided that it needed to go into one issue. Barber wrote to Buford on September 18, telling him of the decision and asking to be released. He replied the next week saying that he had concluded as much himself but, regretfully, he knew he could not get the pages needed. The next day, Barber confirmed the situation and asked to be set free as soon as possible since she wanted the story to run before the end of the year. Buford wrote a letter of release September 25, asking Barber to encourage Munro to send them another story soon. The release of “The Love of a Good Woman” was duly secured. Even so, the story did first appear in the New Yorker – it ran in the December 1996 “Special Fiction Issue.” Ironically, after he had released the story, Buford was able to get the pages so he reclaimed “The Love of a Good Woman.”11

  In many ways, its appearance in that special fiction issue of the New Yorker encapsulates the magazine under Tina Brown’s editorship. Munro’s story was the third of three, the first two by Richard Russo and Don DeLillo; there are pieces on food by Salman Rushdie and Anton Chekhov (the latter, obviously, not new but a new translation), and Buford asks in his “Comment,” “Can fiction be nourishing?” His comment tries to tie the pieces on food to the stories. On the contents page along with the title, each story is offered with a rhetorical cutline. Under “The Love of a Good Woman,” the editors have asked and asserted “How much is too much? A story of murder, an appalling secret, and a perversion of the romantic.” The New Yorker subtitle as Munro’s text begins is “A murder, a mystery, a romance” and throughout the text there are quotations used as running heads referring to the story’s incidents or lifted from its language. Carol Beran has analyzed the presentation of “The Love of a Good Woman” here within a discussion of Munro’s fiction in the New Yorker since 1977. She comments that the running heads focus attention “on how the story touches on popular media images,” notes 122 interruptions in the text of “Love,” and sees Munro’s treatment of adultery as flourishing under Brown’s editorship. Such shapings – typographical illustrations of Brown and Buford’s attempts to make the fiction in the New Yorker topical, “cutting edge” – are of less moment than the author’s note Munro decided to insert at the beginning of The Love of a Good Woman when the book appeared in September 1998: “Stories included in this collection that were previously published in The New Yorker appeared there in very different form.”

  When the book version appeared, Tina Brown was no longer editor of the New Yorker – in July 1998 she became the first editor to resign. Buford remained head of fiction through October 2002. Nonetheless, Munro felt sufficiently strongly enough on the point to call attention to the handling of some of the stories included in the volume. In two or three stories “the cuts were really more drastic than I thought they should be.” She understood the necessity and was certainly used to the usual cutting, but in these cases the cuts made the story “not the same story I wanted to publish.” Changes to “The Love of a Good Woman” were actually very few, but those to “The Children Stay” were a different matter. Munro said that “I cut quite a bit out of that and I felt the cuts were not good for [it].” As she had done before, Munro restored this material to the book publication, but here she felt the need to call attention publicly to what had happened. Alice Quinn, whose job it was to effect the changes asked of her by Buford, concedes that at the time she thought some of the cuts were a bit arbitrary, that his style of editing “was a little more aggressive.” She recalls being told to “cut a column and a half,” for instance, and knows that Munro was well aware that such cuts were being made for reasons of space rather than for any justifiable editorial purpose. Quinn explained further that under Brown competition for space in the magazine between various types of writing was keen and that long stories, already long and getting longer like Munro’s, were especially vulnerable. Whether these space problems were driven by display advertising, as has often been asserted, there is no question but that they affected Munro’s stories. (Under Brown, circulation went up but advertising dropped and the New Yorker remained in the red, losing money throughout her tenure.)

  Though clearly affected by space constraints brought on by new editors bent on remaking the New Yorker, Munro was by the late 1990s still a very respected presence in its pages. Recalling these times, McGrath commented that she just sailed on during the years after he left: “By then she was Alice Munro.” Quinn has said in an interview on other matters that “to read a story by Alice Munro is to be swept away.” Interviewing Munro herself in “Go Ask Alice,” Quinn asked her about her first sale to the New Yorker in 1976, and Munro replied, “Selling to The New Yorker made the whole business of being a short-story writer valid in a way, because I still have these recurring fits of I must give this up and write a novel.” More than this, Munro continued, the New Yorker “came along at absolutely the right time” in her career. “And it also got me the readership that I needed to feel encouraged, because in Canada I was for a long time seen as a slightly outmoded writer.” Drawing on the magazine’s internal files for a talk she gave on Munro at a short story conference in Stratford in 2000, Quinn quoted editor Rachel MacKenzie’s critique of “Royal Beatings” and, from her own time there, one from long-time editor and writer Roger Angell’s first assessment of “The Children Stay”: “This is prime Munro – a strongly written, absorbing, wholly original story, with a startling turn of events in the middle. One great source of power in her work that you notice over and over again is the way her characters accept the bizarre, the outlandish, with so little protest, they’re saying, OK, this is the way life is, nothing can be done about it. She’s onto truth, I think, and that’s why she can write this way, with daring and calm, and absolute pitch.”

  “The Children Stay” came into the New Yorker in October 1997 and, given such a reading by such a person as Angell and despite difficulties with its cuts, found its way into print before the end of the year. Other stories were not so fortunate. In the same letter in which she sent “The Children Stay,” Barber asked to “trade” Buford it for “Queenie” – she had another outlet for it and comments that the latter “is getting old there.” Since it later appeared in the London Review of Books, Buford must have taken the trade. Another story from this time, “Jakarta,” was published in Saturday Night and drew press attention in Canada since it was Munro’s first appearance in a Canadian magazine since 1982. A reviewer for the Globe and Mail wrote that “it’s awfully nice to see Munro’s mild-mannered Canadian misfits in The New Yorker. But it’s even better to read a Munro story, with characters one can relate to, set against a Canadian background, in a Canadian magazine.” Nationalist celebrating aside, the availability of “Jakarta” to Saturday Night meant that the New Yorker had passed on it. Still, despite the problems Munro experienced under Brown’s editorship, the magazine published five of the eight stories included in Love. One, “Cortes Island,” varied from longstanding New Yorker practice by appearing after the book had been published while another, “Before the Change,” barely preceded it. Two stories, “Rich as Stink” and “My Mother’s Dream,” had their first publication in the book.12

  Probably more than any other single story Munro had written, “The Love of a Good Woman” had an almost immediate effect. That the New Yorker found the pages necessary for a story of its length – over seventy pages in straight type, often called a novella – was worth remarking, but beyond that, readers and critics immediately saw it as a tour de force. It was selected
for an O. Henry Prize (the first year Canadians were eligible), and critical articles on the story began appearing almost immediately. When it appeared in the O. Henry Prize volume, Munro described its beginnings:

  What did I know about this story? A man and woman disposing of her lover’s body. This happened on an island off the B.C. coast – they put him in his own boat and towed him out into open water (into Desolation Sound, actually, which is a bit too much for a story). The sudden switch from sex to murder to marital cooperation seemed to me one of those marvelous, unlikely, acrobatic pieces of human behavior. The lover got transferred into a car, and it all went on in Huron County, and the boys got into it, and their families, and Enid, who took over the story as insistently as she took over a sickroom. And there is the boat, still, waiting by the bank of Maitland River.

  Tellingly, Munro makes no effort here to disguise the identity of her home place. In the story, too, details resonate wonderfully without achieving clear meaning: The murdered man, Mr. Willens, bears the same name as the lothario in Alice Laidlaw’s second published story, “Story for Sunday”; “Love” takes place during the same spring and summer that Alice Laidlaw left university, worked in the tobacco fields, and prepared to marry James Munro; and finally, its putative adulterer, Jeannette Quinn, dies on Alice Laidlaw’s twentieth birthday.