Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

between the two published versions lie in Munro’s depiction of Willa Cather – this story offers a beautiful analysis of a writer’s self-absorption, and of Cather’s in particular. In her revisions, Munro makes her Cather more inscrutable and much more compelling. For some readers the story is a dig at Cather’s putative homosexuality; as McGrath commented in a letter to Munro referring to that reading, “People who are looking for a slight can find one almost anywhere. It’s a humane and compassionate story, and you ought to feel nothing but pride in it.” McGrath is right. While Lydia’s anxieties in the story have much to do with her relations with men, and she does use the fact that Cather lived with another woman against Mr. Stanley, these details sharpen and deepen Munro’s “human and compassionate” depiction of her characters and of Cather herself. 9
    Yet the changes in “Dulse” do not really address the various ways that the
New Yorker
itself furthered Munro’s fiction. “The Turkey Season” offers a particular instance of both what Munro was doing in her stories in 1980 and just how McGrath and the other editors at the
New Yorker
were responding. She explained the story’s beginnings in an interview she gave on the book tour for
Moons;
asked about it, Munroreplied, “Why is it interesting to me to make turkey-gutting vivid? It just is.” She also explained the story’s contexts, and some of her comments speak to “Working for a Living” as well:
    A few years ago when I was going through my father’s effects, I saw a picture of the workers at the turkey barn. My father had a turkey barn: it was a very small business, but he would have a half a dozen people at Christmas. My brother and sister worked there, too, although I didn’t. I was in college by that time. What I wanted to do was to portray all this complicated social life that goes on in work places, in jobs that most people think are hideous and boring. And also the work itself – there’s some kind of enormous satisfaction in jobs like that, in doing them well. I wrote a memoir about my father and the kinds of work he did.…
    Thus Munro began with a literal picture – her father’s photograph became the photograph of the turkey crew taken just as “The Turkey Season” ends – and she set to work imagining her story. Having never worked as a turkey-gutter herself, she got expert advice from her brother-in-law, Joe Radford, who had. (Thus the story’s dedication in book form. She had availed herself of Fremlin’s knowledge of woodcutting, in the same way, for “Wood.”)
    Once the story was submitted and accepted, Munro sent McGrath another version, as is her frequent practice. Most of the time when this happened, as with “The Moons of Jupiter,” McGrath thought the second version an improvement; here he did not. He told Munro – on the phone, he recalled, since at this point they still had not met – that “the best story here is a combination,” so he set about combining the two versions before the story was set. In sending her the proofs of the combined version, he characterized the result as “a kind of composite made up from your two versions. I didn’t keep track, exactly, but I would guess that it’s about 50–50, new and old. In general, whenever it was a question of a word or a line, the second version almost always seemed to me finer or sharper, but in the case of some of the longeradditions I sometimes felt that some of the spareness and understatement of the first version was preferable.”
    Munro liked what he had done. McGrath recalls this time period as one when Munro “started really experimenting with form and with the notion of what a story was.” Her stories “stopped being so linear and she brought them into this whole thing of taking these long temporal detours and then coming back.” Not too far into their writer-editor relationship, McGrath recalls, “the trust kicked in.” They sensed that they were both working in the same direction.
    At the same time, “The Turkey Season” had language (“ ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ ”) in it that violated the
New Yorker’s
“Naughty Words Policy.” Regarding such words, McGrath told her that “Mr. Shawn remains unyielding.” One set of galleys illustrates the ways of the
New Yorker
at the time. Writing about “Lily and Marjorie, two middle-aged sisters,” Munro characterized them as “very fast and thorough and competitive