Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

West Hanratty it ran from factory workers and foundry workers down to large improvident families of casual bootleggers and prostitutes and unsuccessful thieves. Rose thought of her own family as straddling the river, belonging nowhere, but that was not true. West Hanratty was where the store was and they were, on the straggling tail end of the main street.
    Such added details confirm that Rose’s West Hanratty is based on the facts of Alice Munro’s Lower Wingham, remembered. So too other pieces written at the time. In fall 1977, just under a year after he first wrote Munro accepting “Royal Beatings” and just before the
New Yorker
offered her an initial first-reading agreement, McGrath wrote her rejecting the long version of “Chaddeleys and Flemings.” Mr. Shawn, he explained, “felt it read more like straight reminiscence than a story,” so for the first (and probably only) time, Shawn overruled the fiction department’s recommendation regarding a Munro story. McGrath continued, saying he was “not sure” he agreed and, while he did think that the magazine had published too much reminiscence and autobiographical fiction in the past, he did not think “Chaddeleys andFlemings” was “that kind of piece. I don’t know whether it’s autobiographical or not, but it’s my feeling that you’ve taken the material of reminiscence and turned it into something much stronger – a moving, complicated work of fiction.”
    McGrath was sensing the shift that was still taking place in Munro’s writing since returning to Huron County. This succession – “Royal Beatings” to “Chaddeleys and Flemings” to “Working for a Living” – reveals the rising autobiographical impulse in Munro’s work. In “Royal Beatings,” the detail of West Hanratty just over the bridge from Hanratty and Rose’s family store there replicates the geography of the Lower Town of Munro’s childhood. Remembered, fictionalized, it is consistent with Rose’s sense of her family’s status. With “Chaddeleys and Flemings,” there are also points of autobiographical correspondence: the cousins in “Connection” existed, even if their exact visit did not take place; so too Mr. Black in “The Stone in the Field,” and the father’s sisters were there though they have been moved up a generation from Munro’s experience. “Working for a Living” was a story begun with autobiographical underpinnings that became, upon revision, a beautiful memoir. It was one that Munro herself thought good and that McGrath, when he rejected it as a memoir after rejecting it the year before as a story, called “a considerable achievement.” He continued: “It’s lively, touching, and beautifully written. But the trouble – for us, I mean – is that not only is this a memoir, but in tone and form and style it’s a kind of
classic
, or completely traditional, one: exactly the kind of piece, that is, that we did so much of in the past and are now overcompensating for.” McGrath rejected “Working for a Living” just at the beginning of the magazine’s first “Munro bonanza” (as he would later describe another run of stories). 1 Between April 1 and early September 1980 McGrath accepted five Munro stories (“Dulse,” “Wood,” “The Turkey Season,” “Labor Day Dinner,” and “Prue”) while rejecting two others (“Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd” and “Visitors”) in addition to “Working.” Bonanza indeed: Munro qualified for the
New Yorker
first-reading bonus of an extra 20 per cent for all five stories. Enough stories for another collection in fact.
    After she had read the first of these stories and just as she was devising a submission strategy for them, Barber sent Munro her enthusiastic response:
    I sense a new style in this “stuff” you’ve sent – plainer, bare of metaphor, but with rhythms so strong that I feel safer than I’ve felt in years. Your sentences always treat the reader so well – no manhandling, no tricks, no dead falls. Not that there’s anything placid or safe about the stories. There’s that grief in “Dulse” which suddenly springs out and bowls you over. Or [from “Working”] “was his life now something that only other people had a use for.” I hadn’t thought about that. I’m not going to go on except to say what fun, and thanks. They’re wonderful stories.
    These stories became the core of
The Moons of Jupiter
. The next run, those that became
The Progress of Love
, had McGrath