Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Secrets
to be overrepresented, in view of its recent publication, so Close, who took the lead as the book went into the initial stages of production, talked to Munro about dropping both “Open Secrets” and “A Wilderness Station.” By mid-February she was reporting to the others that Munro had agreed to cut the first but wanted to keep the second, suggesting dropping either “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You” or “Who Do You Think You Are?” instead. She and Close ultimately decided on the latter. This left them with a collection of twenty-nine stories (though “Chaddeleys and Flemings” was treated as one story, so it looks like twenty-eight) that ran to 560 pages.
Selected Stories
was published in a larger 6.25″ by 9.25″ format by both McClelland & Stewart and Knopf; they both used theKnopf setting but printed separately. Chatto & Windus produced their own version of just twenty-three stories, but published on November 7, virtually the same time as McClelland & Stewart (October 19) and Knopf (October also, with 40,000 as a first printing). In addition to its regular trade edition, Knopf produced a number signed by Munro and packaged in a slipcase. 8
    Munro’s out-of-the-way location during the book’s manufacture handicapped her involvement, but there is no evidence that she was much involved beyond the selection of stories and approval of the photographs used in connection with the book. It was set from photocopied pages of first publication and, while copy-editing and other textual changes were kept to a minimum, it is probably not surprising that there were more changes – beyond the wholesale shift to American spellings throughout – in the earlier stories. Some changes were substantive, though most were not; some, too, were dictated by the demands of design (some of the “silent” space breaks were omitted, for example). Munro did not read galleys of the book and, throughout the material in the Calgary archives there is no evidence her direct involvement. Of the twenty-nine stories
Selected Stories
includes, four are from
Dance
, three from
Something
, four from
Who / Beggar Maid
, six (though it looks like five) from
Moons
, five from
Progress
, three from
Friend
, and four from
Open Secrets
. Some of the ordering is changed from the first publication. Finally, and tellingly, the
Selected Stories
was published without any explanation of the basis of selection, any identification of who made the selection. Neither was there an author’s introduction.
    The copy Gibson wrote for the McClelland & Stewart catalogue defines just how Munro’s
Selected Stories
was offered: “A literary event. A generous selection of stories drawn from Alice Munro’s seven collections spanning almost 30 years. A volume that will give enormous pleasure while it confirms Munro’s place in the very front ranks of today’s writers of fiction.” In his Editor’s Note used inside the publishing house to describe the book, Gibson also wrote that “this volume is both a tribute to [Munro] and a demonstration how richly that tribute is deserved.” Contextually, too, Munro’s
Selected Stories
was beingpublished as a Douglas Gibson Book on the same fall 1996 list as Mavis Gallant’s
Selected Stories
– they were added to that list through the same memorandum. This coincidence led to inevitable comparisons of Canada’s two leading practitioners of the short story, both of whom had made much of their reputation through the pages of the
New Yorker
.
    Each writer was seen differently at home, however. Writing one of the first reviews to appear in Canada in
Quill & Quire
, Bert Archer treated the two books together and clearly preferred Gallant’s stories. Of Munro, he wrote that in Canada she “is the better known and more widely read, concentrating as she does on our own stories, on characters and situations often so familiar that our lives and her stories mesh, her writing becomes part of the fabric of our memories.” Writing that Gallant’s “prose makes us forget that a misstep is even possible, Munro, from time to time, stumbles. Her sentences are written, rather than crafted, are often a little rough, probably intentionally, like her characters, like her world.” Although he admits that there is “a simplicity, an honesty [in this,] what there is not is transcendence” as there is in Gallant’s stories. He concludes “that there is likely no reading person in this country who would like