Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

first-reading agreement brought a payment of just one hundred dollars. Although the money involved from the
New Yorker
was very real, much more than writers could obtain elsewhere, the importance of the contract to Munro and her career is found in McGrath’s penultimate sentence: “The point of all this is simply that we feel your writing is very special, and we want to express our gratitude to you for letting us see it.” Recalling this decision early in 2003, McGrath indicated that a first-reading agreement made little more than a year after he and his colleagues first took up Munro’s stories made her work special indeed, quite exceptional. It normally took a person considerably more time to get to that point. 22
    What Barber called the
New Yorker’s
“amusing hauteur” under William Shawn bears comment since similar formalities may be inferred in McGrath’s constructions (“we want to express our gratitude” or, when he first wrote, “we would be honored if you will let us publish” “Royal Beatings”). Writing Munro then, McGrath was establishing a relationship with her that he already had with other writers, relationships enacted largely through the mails and over the telephone, in which he had to both explain the
New Yorker’s
ways and maintain the writer’s control and cooperation as the process moved toward publication. Given the magazine’s prominence – especially since the 1970s was one of its most prosperous decades – it could well afford to buy the best. At the same time, and this was a peculiarity that began under Harold Ross but was enshrined under Shawn, the writer’s agreement to whatever changes were proposed was paramount. Thus authors could, and occasionally did, refuse to go along with changes and pull their work. So McGrath’s formalities were not nearly the pose they might sound, nor were they disingenuous. McGrath knew he had the power brought by a big cheque and he wielded it carefully.
    The results for Alice Munro herself were enormous, certainly. Without question, getting into the
New Yorker
, causing a buzz in New York publishing circles, and receiving a first-reading agreement within just a year’s time, all moved her career to another level. However, the real effect of the new arrangement was on her work itself. During the 1950s and 1960s Robert Weaver and his colleagues at the CBC and at the
Tamarack Review
responded to, and appreciated, the stories she sent. In Earle Toppings and Audrey Coffin at Ryerson she had sympathetic editors who responded to, encouraged, and to some degree prodded her. With John Metcalf it was mostly commiseration, although his frequent comments on her published work were a real tonic. But in Barber and, by extension, McGrath and the rest of the fiction editors at the
New Yorker
, and editors at other magazines too, Munro had a group of people who were responding to, encouraging her and, often, pushing toward a revision. Barber, of course, had a vested interest in Munro’s success; as her author succeeded, so did she. But in reading the correspondence, weighing the questions and answers it contains, and inferring the telephone conversations that accompanied those letters, one sees that it is clear that Barber and Munro formed a partnership very quickly. Both of them were engaged in and stimulated by the contacts Barber had made in New York.

    Yet for Munro’s art and the growth of her career, these new arrangements were much more than publication by the continent’s leading venue for short fiction. Her return to Huron County and the renewal of her imaginative connections there meant that the stories Munro wrote during 1976 were imbued with a more immediate sensibility and also a different imaginative relation to her subject matter than she had previously displayed. In the stories she intended for
Who Do You Think You Are?
(including those ultimately held out of that volume to await the next collection,
The Moons of Jupiter)
, Munro can be seen to be looking back to childhood, but reconnecting to the continuity of life itself in Huron County from her middle-aged perspective. She still rememberedher discovery of the complexities of her home (“Connection. That was what it was all about”) but those memories were now more distant. While this balancing of a child’s perspective with the narrating adult’s sensibility is also evident in many of the stories in
Dance
and
Lives
, there is a qualitative difference, a new-found complexity,