Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

account described the scene, naming some of the famed literati present that day. Buford, so presented, was offered by Brown as one who, in fact, had been made “suddenly one of the most important tastemakers in the country.”
    Much of this happened at the
New Yorker
during Munro’s writing time – that is, after she had completed
Open Secrets
and before the stories that became
The Love of a Good Woman
were ready for consideration. While Buford acquired Munro’s stories for the magazine between 1996 and 2002, and certainly helped shape her stories for publication while he headed the fiction department, her primary editors at the
New Yorker
were Alice Quinn from 1996 to 2000 and, since then, Deborah Treisman. Quinn, who was an editor at Knopf when she first ran across Munro’s work in 1977, joined the
New Yorker
in 1987 and later succeeded Howard Moss as its poetry editor. The first Munro story Quinn handled was “The Love of a Good Woman,” one Barber submitted during the spring of 1996 just after Munro had returned from Ireland and had rewritten the story.
    Buford may have seen the story before Barber wrote him in early May telling him that Munro had not been able to turn the three-part “Love” into stories. She enclosed a copy of it in any case, and also passed along Munro’s apology that the story is so “old-fashioned.” By the end of May Barber reported to Gibson that the
New Yorker
did want to buy “Love,” but the cuts they had proposed would change the story considerably. So Alice and she were talking. In August Buford wroteMunro directly, indicating his admiration for the story, explaining that at first he thought “a single, substantial cut” would work, but indicating that even with it the story would still be seventeen thousand words long. His preference was to run it in a single issue, but the difficulty was finding the space. He also suggested running the story in two instalments, as they had when “A Queer Streak” was published in
Granta
. Responding, Munro, Barber, and Close had discussions about ways to handle the story, but ultimately they decided that it needed to go into one issue. Barber wrote to Buford on September 18, telling him of the decision and asking to be released. He replied the next week saying that he had concluded as much himself but, regretfully, he knew he could not get the pages needed. The next day, Barber confirmed the situation and asked to be set free as soon as possible since she wanted the story to run before the end of the year. Buford wrote a letter of release September 25, asking Barber to encourage Munro to send them another story soon. The release of “The Love of a Good Woman” was duly secured. Even so, the story did first appear in the
New Yorker
– it ran in the December 1996 “Special Fiction Issue.” Ironically, after he had released the story, Buford was able to get the pages so he reclaimed “The Love of a Good Woman.” 11
    In many ways, its appearance in that special fiction issue of the
New Yorker
encapsulates the magazine under Tina Brown’s editorship. Munro’s story was the third of three, the first two by Richard Russo and Don DeLillo; there are pieces on food by Salman Rushdie and Anton Chekhov (the latter, obviously, not new but a new translation), and Buford asks in his “Comment,” “Can fiction be nourishing?” His comment tries to tie the pieces on food to the stories. On the contents page along with the title, each story is offered with a rhetorical cutline. Under “The Love of a Good Woman,” the editors have asked and asserted “How much is too much? A story of murder, an appalling secret, and a perversion of the romantic.” The
New Yorker
subtitle as Munro’s text begins is “A murder, a mystery, a romance” and throughout the text there are quotations used as running heads referring to the story’s incidents or lifted from its language. Carol Beran has analyzedthe presentation of “The Love of a Good Woman” here within a discussion of Munro’s fiction in the
New Yorker
since 1977. She comments that the running heads focus attention “on how the story touches on popular media images,” notes 122 interruptions in the text of “Love,” and sees Munro’s treatment of adultery as flourishing under Brown’s editorship. Such shapings – typographical illustrations of Brown and Buford’s attempts to make the fiction in the
New Yorker
topical, “cutting edge” – are of less moment than the