Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

although her plan was to concentrate on it in September with the intention of getting it into production by the end of the month. After Munro reported that she was about to send another version of “Simon’s Luck” along, Huber responded that they would begin connecting the stories through their details when Munro was ready. She had not received galleys from Gibson, but she did not see that as relevant to the book they were working on. In fact, Huber saw her project as a wholly separate book.
    That separateness is borne out by the materials connected to it in the Calgary archives. On September 12 Huber wrote a long letter to Munro outlining her proposed organization, one she saw as a novel, she wrote, at least as much as
Lives
. The arrangement she envisioned corresponds to a manuscript table of contents of
The Beggar Maid
– that is its title there – with “chapters” listed as follows:
    One:
Royal Beatings
Two:
Privilege
Three:
Half a Grapefruit
Four:
Characters
Five:
Nerve
Six:
The Beggar Maid
Seven:
Mischief
Eight:
Providence
Nine:
True Enemies
Ten:
Simon’s Luck
Eleven:
Spelling
    But for the exclusion of “Characters,” the addition of “Who Do You Think You Are?” and the reposition of “Spelling,” this arrangement anticipates the final book. (“Nerve” was Huber’s preferred title for “Wild Swans.”) In its final guise,
The Beggar Maid
had stories, of course, not “chapters.”
    The Norton version of
The Beggar Maid
was written in the first person and, as Huber edited the manuscript, that did not change. She did propose, and Munro accepted, large-scale shifts from present tense to past, and Huber paid particular attention to the endings of each story. The chapter listed as “True Enemies,” for instance, is actually the final scene of “The Beggar Maid” – when Rose happens upon Patrick in the Toronto airport years after their marriage ended and he makes a horrid face at her – moved back and treated as a separate unit. In another instance, Huber proposed the deletion of the last section of “Privilege,” the part beginning “The school changed with the war.” Throughout, she pressed to lessen the sense of stories ending so that the reader moved smoothly into the next chapter. To Hoy, Huber commented that Munro was easy about the changes to the ending. When she came to draft descriptive copy for the book’s dust jacket flap, Huber used language that made clear her novelistic strategy:
    The Beggar Maid
is the story of Rose, in her journey from childhood to womanhood, a trip that takes her from aningrown, rude life in a small town, to college, marriage, motherhood, and later a separate peace as an actress. It is an
immense
journey, a painful journey, which Rose makes alone, armed with an unwavering, penetrating sense of other people’s foibles and sins. She is shy but ambitious, and gifted with a ribald, humorous sense of appreciation for the “luck” in her life.
    When Munro wrote to Gibson with the suggestion of “Who Do You Think You Are?” as a better title for the book, she also asked him, “What do you think of its revelation that Janet has written the Rose stories?” To Barber, he reported that he was quite happy with this revelation. But as the book proceeded through production over the summer and as Huber reshaped the Rose material she envisioned, it turned out that Munro was not satisfied with the revelation herself. After hearing that Huber liked the new “Simon’s Luck,” which she had sent in August, Munro wrote to her on September 16 that she “was in a frenzied state here, trying to get” Macmillan to pull
Who
“and print a Rose book with the new
Simon’s Luck.”
Writing to Huber again on the nineteenth, this time from the Macmillan offices in Toronto, Munro explained what she realized and what she did about it:
    After you said you liked
Simon’s Luck
I got more and more convinced that the series of Rose stories was the only way to do this book and that the Macmillan book was a dreadful awkward waste of good material and I
couldn’t
let them do it. (I couldn’t have reached this decision any earlier because I didn’t have
Simon’s Luck.)
Upshot of this was that I came down here and made my case. The book is already at the printers pub date Nov. 18 th and they daren’t get it out any later. So, I said, what about leaving the first half – Royal Beatings to the Beggar Maid, intact, and reprinting the second half, as follows: Mischief,