Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

scope of Munro’s past book contracts and wanted to contact Marilyn Gray, the person who handled rights at McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Her hope was to get access to the rights to Munro’s past work so she could resell them; she wanted “to absorb the facts and figures from your past contracts so that I’ll have done my homework when the future project comes into my present.”
    On November 1, a Monday, Barber reported that “the stories arrived, finally” the previous Thursday and that she “carried them home like a treasure, which they are” to read over the weekend. She had already submitted four of the seven stories to the
New Yorker
– “Honeyman’s Granddaughter” (later titled “Privilege”), “Providence,” “Royal Beatings,” and “Spelling.” Barber was planning to send “some of the others” to Lisel Eisenheimer at
McCall’s
the next day. Beyond the stories, she also told Munro that she had just met, in New York, with John Savage and Robin Brass from McGraw-Hill Ryerson. They brought “the contracts and other relevant information. We had a goodtalk.” Barber concluded this letter by offering an indicative hope that proved prescient: “I’m delighted to have the stories, Alice, and I hope this is the real beginning of a fine working relationship. I’m already waving banners for you down here, and that means you can roll your eyes heavenward in mild protest but no more. You also don’t have to look. I feel you’ve turned me loose at last, and I’m ever so ready to go! Write well, enjoy, and I’ll be sending these stories to all decent magazines.”
    Barber’s timing with the
New Yorker
, the first among these magazines, proved excellent. She approached Charles McGrath, a new fiction editor there, and submitted Munro’s stories to him over lunch. At the time, the two did not know each other. McGrath was one of two young editors – the other was Daniel Menaker – who had joined the fiction department earlier that same year as a result of the forced retirements of Robert Henderson and William Maxwell. Both McGrath and Menaker had graduated from university in the 1960s and, after some graduate work, had each joined the magazine in entry-level editorial positions, Menaker as a fact-checker in 1969 and McGrath as a copy editor in 1973. When the retirements were looming, each spent a period of time apprenticing with Maxwell, sitting at a desk opposite his in order to learn just what a fiction editor did. 16
    At the
New Yorker
it is customary to speak of “the fiction department,” an entity made up of a head editor and several other editors. When Munro’s stories came in, the
New Yorker
was still being edited by its second and longest-serving editor, William Shawn. He had been with the magazine since 1933 and had been editor since 1952, when he took over after the death of its founding editor, Harold W. Ross. A native of Colorado, a reporter, and a veteran who had edited
Stars and Stripes
as a private in France during the war, Ross founded the
New Yorker
in 1925 with the financial backing of Raoul Fleischmann, whose family made its money in baking. It sought an audience that was both urban and urbane. Almost weekly for over eighty years now, the
New Yorker
has published as broad a range of comment, humour, essays, politics, analysis, cartoons, fiction, poetry, oddities, and silly pieces as might be imagined. While fiction was not of particular moment during the magazine’s early years, it rose to prominence under KatherineWhite and expanded further under Shawn’s editorship. By the time Munro was submitting stories to the
New Yorker
the size of its “slush pile” was famous, and there was no doubt that the magazine was regarded as the leading venue for short fiction in the United States. 17
    When McGrath and Menaker were brought in, the fiction department was headed by Roger Angell; the other editors were Frances Kiernan, Rachel MacKenzie, and Derrick Morgan. There were also young people whose job it was to sift through the slush pile and forward stories with potential to one of the editors. The department operated by consensus. Each editor would read those stories that came directly to them and then write an opinion of the piece – strengths, weaknesses, needed revisions, and a conclusion whether to buy it or not. Through this process a decision gradually emerged, although most of the time one or another editor was on the other side of the decision. Stories recommended for