Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Munro described in her second letter of May 19, save that “Accident” has been dropped – and he indicated that in “Who Do You Think You Are?” it is revealed, in “a coup de theatre,” that Janet is the author of the Rose stories. Thus for the dust jacket he and Alice had been “studying dozens of magic realist paintings in the hope of finding just the right one” to capture the Rose-Janet relation. Gibson ends, “I’m awfully sorry about my past sins of omission. Let’s be friends.”
    This incident is important less for the specifics of what happened than for what it portended. In writing Gibson as directly as she did and by the manner in which she presented herself, Barber was asserting her necessary presence in Munro’s affairs. Gibson readily acknowledged hisunderstanding of her presence and indicated his willingness to establish an ongoing professional relation with her that respected her role. In retrospect, this exchange proved a formative moment in Munro’s career. Through the making of
Who Do You Think You Are?/The Beggar Maid
, Barber, Gibson, and Munro were establishing for the first time the professional relations that have served Munro’s work well in the succession of books she has published since, from
The Moons of Jupiter
in 1982 through
Runaway
in 2004. Gibson’s comment that he and Munro had been looking for “just the right” magic realist painting is indicative, too, since as her Canadian editor he has justifiably prided himself on the choice of appropriate artworks for her dust jackets. Given the initial Rose-Janet relation in Who, they first settled on a detail from Christopher Pratt’s
Young Woman in a Slip
, where the young woman is looking into a mirror. Rejecting it (though it was later used on the dust jacket of the Canadian edition of
Moons)
, they ultimately opted for a detail of Ken Danby’s
The Sunbather
. Gibson’s covers, from this one to the painting of a dishevelled bed by Mary Pratt on the dust jacket of
Runaway
, have been capsule symbols of the elegant everyday found in Munro’s writing.

    In his mea-culpa letter, Gibson also remarks that “Alice, as you perhaps know, is a little worried about what she hears of Norton’s plans, and it would obviously be ideal for Norton and Macmillan to publish the same book. My hope is that when they see our galleys they will be immensely impressed and will wish to publish it.” 32 Nothing of the kind happened, however. As Helen Hoy has written in the best account of the making of
Who Do You Think You Are?/The Beggar Maid
, “Norton was moving in another direction, making earnest attempts to turn the same material into a novel. As early as 20 June 1978 … the editors were assuming the publication of two quite different collections, with Sherry Huber resolute about excluding material extraneous to Rose’s story.” The difference between the two publishers, as Hoy details, was that Macmillan, unlike Norton, “was scrupulous not to pressure [Munro] to produce that more marketable commodity, anovel.” While true enough with regard to the structure, Macmillan’s deadline in late spring 1978 had pressed Munro into coming up with the two-part arrangement of Rose and Janet stories. With the book in production by mid-June, Munro’s work with Huber – separate, through the mails and the phone, extending over the summer – involved what Hoy called “her more leisurely mulling over of the single-heroine version she was working on for Norton.”
    Recalling that work when she was interviewed by Hoy in 1988, Huber said that she had seen Munro’s manuscript as connected short stories all along, that the other heroines – those who became Janet in the first Macmillan
Who
– were clearly Rose. She saw the question of whether the book was called a novel or short stories to be one of marketing. A book marketed as a novel in those days always sold considerably more than one presented as short stories. In notes dated June 11, 1978, Huber can be seen differentiating the Rose material (“Royal Beatings,” “Privilege,” “Half a Grapefruit,” “Characters,” “Wild Swans,” “Spelling,” and “The Beggar Maid”) from the way Macmillan was structuring those stories and the others. She set “Mischief” and “Providence” apart, as Janet stories, and then “Simon’s Luck” further apart with the notation that Munro thinks it is better in three sections. Huber was working on the manuscript over the summer,