Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Emily, Sheila, and Angela, each of whom breaks with Simon. Angela does so most dramatically – she runs an errand to the store but decides to drive Simon’s car to a train station, where she buys a ticket and boards the transcontinental train, returning the keys by mail. The Emily section was the section published in
Who
, with Emily’s name changed to Rose; relocated, some of Sheila’s and Angela’s situations and actions inform the character of Lydia in “Dulse.” As Munro reported to Gibson, she did not waste much of her writing.
    McGrath and his colleagues at the
New Yorker
came to the same conclusion about the revised “Simon’s Luck,” for he wrote to Barber in December with the comment that “the three sections do stand by themselves, I guess, but they seem skimpy somehow – compared with the fullness of the first version, anyway – and in these separate stories Simon seems as enigmatic as ever; at times he hardly seems to be there at all.” He added, “What I do know is that there’s a lot of wonderful writing here, and I hate to lose it. We all do.” Even in the face of this second rejection, Barber and Munro continued to press the story since the
New Yorker
saw, and again rejected, the Sheila section as a separate story. “Emily,” which became “Simon’s Luck” in
Who
(after Munro tried shifting it to first person), appeared in
Viva
in 1978. 23
    When “Royal Beatings” appeared in the
New Yorker
in March 1977, John Metcalf wrote Munro congratulating her on its appearance. In her return letter Munro told him about the magazine’s back-and-forth editing process, its pickiness, and especially its prudery, which surprised her. “Everyone at the
New Yorker
is in thrall to some deity upstairs called Mr. Shawn. ‘We doubt very much if this will get by Mr. Shawn,’ they say sadly. They have not been so hard on ‘The Beggar Maid,’ the second story they took.” Munro then moves on to other topics.
    However long she may have tried to get her stories into the
New Yorker
, like most people Munro was unaware of Mr. Shawn’s position atop the magazine until she had to deal with his policies through McGrath. His task was to carry the discussion to Shawn, to win the point over pickled arseholes and snot but lose over the bathroomnoises, which were duly reinstated in the book. Her job, as Barber would continue to tell Munro, was to “write well.” So Munro did. And through the offices of Ginger Barber and Chip McGrath – for so they were to one another very quickly, despite initial formalities – the literary world outside of Canada began to take notice.
“Huron County Blues”
    Canada certainly noticed Munro being noticed. In a March 1977 piece on Munro and Richler in the
Globe and Mail
, William French called attention to “Royal Beatings” in the previous week’s
New Yorker
, offering a progress report on her current writing. Like Richler, whose novel-in-progress had been excerpted in
Saturday Night
, Munro was still “on good terms” with her typewriter. Since her last book, French reports, Munro “has remarried – her new husband is Gerald Fremlin – and settled down in the small town of Clinton, Ont., about 60 miles north of London. ‘I like small town life,’ she explained when I called her the other day. ‘We go for long walks and do a lot of cross-country skiing.’ Clinton is in the snowbelt, but Munro is accustomed to rigorous winters. Wingham, where she grew up and which has provided the setting for many of her stories – the fictional version is called Jubilee – is only 20 miles from Clinton.” 24
    Munro was settling back into life in Huron County, Ontario, and through such published pieces as this, people who knew and admired her work became aware of her return. Munro and Fremlin gradually began to recognize that their life together would be in Clinton, a shared life in a small town where they both felt comfortable. She wrote, her already major reputation in Canada grew through her
New Yorker
appearances, and life settled into a regular seasonal pattern. Andrea came east for summers, her older sisters visited as they could, Munro and Fremlin skied in winter, walked in the spring, summer, and fall, and drove about the countryside exploring and rediscovering – it is not by chance that both “Working for a Living” and “What Do You Want to Know For?” begin with images of Munro and Fremlin on the road,driving about, noticing something. As Munro has said,