Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

awards from abroad were starting to become a regular feature of Munro’s career.
    PEN figured in Munro’s writing at about this time, too, in that she contributed two essays, “What Do You Want to Know For?” and “Changing Places,” to PEN Canada volumes published in support of the Canadian Centre of International PEN . Each essay is revelatory: the latter is an investigation of the Laidlaws’ pioneering history. The former, in effect, is an elaboration of something the narrator in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” says after she hears her father’s explanation of “how the Great Lakes came to be”: “The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquility.” In it, Munro reveals her knowledge of glacial deposition and geological time in concert with a sense of the time passed since Huron County’s first settlement and a sense of her own time. Recounting an investigation she and Fremlin undertook to learn about a crypt they spotted in a cemetery on one of their drives to explore their area, Munro interweaves it with the account of her own brush with a possible cancer in her breast. Contemplating this possibility, at one point she writes, “I am over sixty. My death would not be a calamity. Not in comparison with the death of a young mother, a family wage-earner, a child.”
    Though very real at the time – in 1993 – this possibility proved groundless. But the essay proved prescient: the later 1990s saw Munroincreasingly dealing with other health problems, with her heart in particular. These personal contexts make “What Do You Want to Know For?” all the more revealing, but it is the essay’s final paragraph that captures Munro’s sense of life ongoing: “The corn in tassel, the height of summer passing, time opening out with room for ordinary anxieties, weariness, tiffs, triviality. No more hard edges, or blamelessness, or fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of bees. Back where nothing seems to be happening, beyond the change of seasons.” 10
“And there is the boat, still, waiting by the bank of Maitland River”: New Editors at the
New Yorker, The Love of a Good Woman
    Just after “The Albanian Virgin” had appeared in the
New Yorker
in July 1994, Daniel Menaker left the magazine to become senior editor at Random House. (One of the first projects he edited was the runaway political bestseller
Primary Colors
, by “Anonymous,” a book that features a character who loves Alice Munro’s writing.) Menaker’s departure was followed in November with the announcement that Charles McGrath would also leave in March 1995 to become editor of the
New York Times Book Review
. Since she had replaced Robert Gottlieb as editor in 1992, Tina Brown had effected wholesale changes at the
New Yorker
– the authors’ party, with its glitz, its buzz, and its stylish photographs typified Brown’s approach. But beyond such events, there were more fundamental changes. One of the most-remarked was her decision to change the magazine’s approach to fiction: she cut the number of stories published by about half, moved them back in the presentation (toward what staffers call “the back of the book”), and made fiction compete with non-fiction in a way it had not previously.
    McGrath was deputy editor and had been head of the fiction department for many years before that. When he left, Brown decided to replace him with Bill Buford, an American who had lived in England and edited
Granta
since 1978. Under his direction, it had changed from a small, nondescript publication into a respected quarterly of fiction and non-fiction. Brown gave Buford the new title of fiction and literaryeditor, one that defined a new relation between writer and editor at the magazine. No longer would individual editors directly acquire and then edit the stories of the writers they dealt with. Buford handled the acquiring and oversaw the work of other editors while they worked directly with authors; that is, Brown had Buford supervise the fiction department in a way that had not been done before. His approach was to put his own stamp on the magazine’s fiction rather than proceed by consensus; Buford was to be more than first among equals. After Buford arrived, Brown in typical fashion arranged a luncheon to present him to the New York literary establishment. In June 1995 Buford addressed a room at a trendy restaurant filled with “writers, publishers, agents and editors,” as one