Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

question the major literary event in Canada this year.” He then suggests a new title taken from something one of the characters says in “Providence”; they might call the book
True Lies
. He also suggests that the Rose stories not be grouped together but rather arranged throughout the volume; and he wonders whether Munro would consider breaking “Chaddeleys and Flemings” in two, just at the point where the narrator throws the plate with lemon meringue pie at her husband.
    Having read the manuscript and orally agreed on a contract for it, Gibson was brimming with its possibilities. He was looking to a chance to sit down with Munro and go over it, knowing that she was “still hard at work, obsessively polishing away.” That was indeed her habit, but with this book Munro would make changes continually during its march toward publication, seemingly unable to leave it alone. Writing Gibson little more than a week after his welcoming letter to Munro, Barber told him that “Alice has now put the whole book in first person, removed three stories (Chaddeleys and Flemings, Moons of Jupiter and Accident) and rewritten Simon’s Luck as the last of the adult Rose stories (only one woman, Rose, and Simon).” But for the first person and the addition of “Who Do You Think You Are?” the book as Barber described here is close to the one published, but there were many more changes to consider yet. Within the month, for instance, “The Moons of Jupiter” was back in. She closed her letter with an enticement: “If you’ll call me one day next week, I’ll tell you about the U.S. situation; it’s looking extremely good.” 30
    With Macmillan settled as her Canadian publisher, focus shifted to the American scene. And having prepared the ground, Barber was ready for serious negotiations with interested houses. Barber was keen on finding the right publisher and particularly the right editor, one who would work toward establishing Munro’s reputation in ways compatible with what she herself had already accomplished through magazines. While numerous editors (including Kate Medina at Doubleday) and several publishers were interested in the book, Knopf, Norton, and Viking emerged as the leading bidders. Munro went down to New York to meet them. She and Barber accepted a bid from Norton of a fifteen-thousand-dollar advance. Barber has said that there is “a lot of work for an editor to do in house. They have to work with the marketing department, with publicity and promotion, and they have to be the in-house advocate of the book.” This, she knew, was especially necessary with a collection of stories, one she was seeing as a first collection in the United States, McGraw-Hill’s
Dance
notwithstanding. Sherry Huber, an editor at Norton, was keen on Munro’s work; she seemed to fill thebill. The contract with Norton signed by mid-May, Munro sent Huber the manuscript as it was then.
    Having looked at the manuscript during the bidding process, Huber had already talked to Munro about the Norton book’s organization. Munro wrote Huber two letters on May 19 as she was sending the manuscript. The longer one, probably written first, outlines the organizational possibilities as Munro saw them. She had done all the stories in the first person and, reading them over after getting them back from her typist, she concluded that “the idea of connections did not work. It would make the book seem like a failed, fallen-apart novel. It has to stand as separate stories.”
    Who Do You Think You Are?/The Beggar Maid
unquestionably has the most complex, and fraught, publication history of any of Munro’s books. At the heart of the matter was the tension between a novel and a collection of stories, and then over the exact shape of the collection. Throughout this shaping – which continued throughout 1978 – a group of six stories the book ultimately contained were consistently seen as being about a single character, Rose, who emerged as the focus of the finished book. (These were “Royal Beatings,” “Privilege,” “Half a Grapefruit,” “Wild Swans,” “The Beggar Maid,” and “Spelling.”) Another story, “Characters,” was about Rose but dropped. Six other stories (or seven since “Chaddeleys and Flemings” was, as Gibson had suggested, divided into two) were in play. As Munro indicated to Huber, she experimented in them with first- and third-person voice, trying each at various times, but the real question regarding