Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

guarantee that I will win. I do think we can reach some compromise, however, and troublesome as it may be, I hope you will try to understand our position in this regard.”
    In closing, McGrath details the various steps on the way to publication, including payment once the story is set in type. The
New Yorker
pays on a word rate, so the author cannot be paid until a story is set in type and the word count is established: “We never pay less than a thousand dollars, though, and my guess is that ‘Royal Beatings’ would bring at least two and probably three times that much.” After encouraging Munro to call him (“collect, of course”) to let him “know whether or not to go ahead,” he concluded that “Royal Beatings” is a rare and wonderful piece of work, and “we will be honored if you will let us publish it.” For her part, Munro says that she had never heard of Shawn and thought that people in New York might be making him up. Such a view is not far-fetched: despite his long association with the magazine, Shawn’s name had never been published in its pages to that point. 18
    “Royal Beatings” appeared in the March 14, 1977, issue of the
New Yorker
. McGrath lost the battle about bathroom noises (Munro reinstated the paragraph in
Who)
but he “was able to win the point about ‘arsehole.’ ” By that time the magazine had bought another story,“The Beggar Maid,” and had considered eight more, ten if one counts revisions of “Pleistocene” and “Spelling.” Barber now feels that it took her too long to learn not to send the
New Yorker
Munro’s stories in groups. While Munro has for many years written in spurts and sent her stories in clusters, the act of submitting more than one at a time seemed reasonable at first. However, editors naturally enough pitted the stories against one another, choosing what seemed to them the strongest one. Given its status and the many submissions it received, the
New Yorker’s
editors could afford to be choosy. There was also the matter of the magazine’s appetite: under Shawn it published upwards of a hundred stories annually.
    Yet while they rejected far more of Munro’s stories in the first years than they took, McGrath and his colleagues knew that in Munro they had a real find. Rejections were always tempered by compliments and encouragements. Sending “Mischief” back to Barber, McGrath wrote that they hoped to see another story soon since “we value Alice Munro’s writing very highly here: one editor [Daniel Menaker] has said, ‘I am somewhat crazed with admiration for these stories.’ ” Menaker’s unabashed enthusiasm for Munro’s stories was evident from the first. Closing his December 21 letter to Barber, McGrath wrote, “I hope this is just the beginning of a long relationship between Alice Munro and The New Yorker, and I thank you for helping to make it possible.” 19
    Throughout 1977 Barber and her assistant, Mary Evans, continued to stoke the flames of Munro’s growing reputation in New York. A real buzz was developing, and they worked to keep it buzzing even louder. Just as she promised Munro, she sorted through Munro’s previous book contracts and prepared for the next negotiation, familiarizing herself with Canadian publishers and scouting possibilities among U.S. houses, looking for the right in-house editor for Munro’s next book.
    Kate Medina, a senior editor at Doubleday, had heard of Munro from Clark Blaise. She called McGrath, who referred her to Barber. She wanted to borrow a copy of
Lives
and to see copies of Munro’s manuscript stories. Barber reported this to Munro and commented, “I’m not at all concerned about
finding
you a publisher here, for I think we’ll be able to pick and choose.” When Medina returned the book to Barber,she began her letter by writing, “I have fallen in love with Alice Munro,” expressing her unwillingness to give up the book – “it’s the sort of book one wants to keep
handy.”
Medina was keen on bringing Munro to Doubleday, promising to “lobby zealously for her work here.” The making of such connections would continue into 1978, when most of the stories to be included in the next book had been sold to magazines.
    As most of those stories were turned down by the
New Yorker
during 1977, Barber and Evans, whose primary responsibility was serial placement, sent them to other magazines. They began with other commercial publications in New York before trying Canadian magazines