Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

author’s note Munro decided to insert at the beginning of
The Love of a Good Woman
when the book appeared in September 1998: “Stories included in this collection that were previously published in
The New Yorker
appeared there in very different form.”
    When the book version appeared, Tina Brown was no longer editor of the
New Yorker
– in July 1998 she became the first editor to resign. Buford remained head of fiction through October 2002. Nonetheless, Munro felt sufficiently strongly enough on the point to call attention to the handling of some of the stories included in the volume. In two or three stories “the cuts were really more drastic than I thought they should be.” She understood the necessity and was certainly used to the usual cutting, but in these cases the cuts made the story “not the same story I wanted to publish.” Changes to “The Love of a Good Woman” were actually very few, but those to “The Children Stay” were a different matter. Munro said that “I cut quite a bit out of that and I felt the cuts were not good for [it].” As she had done before, Munro restored this material to the book publication, but here she felt the need to call attention publicly to what had happened. Alice Quinn, whose job it was to effect the changes asked of her by Buford, concedes that at the time she thought some of the cuts were a bit arbitrary, that his style of editing “was a little more aggressive.” She recalls being told to “cut a column and a half,” for instance, and knows that Munro was well aware that such cuts were being made for reasons of space rather than for any justifiable editorial purpose. Quinn explained further that under Brown competition for space in the magazine between various types of writing was keen and that long stories, already long and gettinglonger like Munro’s, were especially vulnerable. Whether these space problems were driven by display advertising, as has often been asserted, there is no question but that they affected Munro’s stories. (Under Brown, circulation went up but advertising dropped and the
New Yorker
remained in the red, losing money throughout her tenure.)
    Though clearly affected by space constraints brought on by new editors bent on remaking the
New Yorker
, Munro was by the late 1990s still a very respected presence in its pages. Recalling these times, McGrath commented that she just sailed on during the years after he left: “By then she was Alice Munro.” Quinn has said in an interview on other matters that “to read a story by Alice Munro is to be swept away.” Interviewing Munro herself in “Go Ask Alice,” Quinn asked her about her first sale to the
New Yorker
in 1976, and Munro replied, “Selling to
The New Yorker
made the whole business of being a short-story writer valid in a way, because I still have these recurring fits of I must give this up and write a novel.” More than this, Munro continued, the
New Yorker
“came along at absolutely the right time” in her career. “And it also got me the readership that I needed to feel encouraged, because in Canada I was for a long time seen as a slightly outmoded writer.” Drawing on the magazine’s internal files for a talk she gave on Munro at a short story conference in Stratford in 2000, Quinn quoted editor Rachel MacKenzie’s critique of “Royal Beatings” and, from her own time there, one from long-time editor and writer Roger Angell’s first assessment of “The Children Stay”: “This is prime Munro – a strongly written, absorbing, wholly original story, with a startling turn of events in the middle. One great source of power in her work that you notice over and over again is the way her characters accept the bizarre, the outlandish, with so little protest, they’re saying, OK , this is the way life is, nothing can be done about it. She’s onto truth, I think, and that’s why she can write this way, with daring and calm, and absolute pitch.”
    “The Children Stay” came into the
New Yorker
in October 1997 and, given such a reading by such a person as Angell and despite difficulties with its cuts, found its way into print before the end of the year. Other stories were not so fortunate. In the same letter in which she sent “The Children Stay,” Barber asked to “trade” Buford it for“Queenie” – she had another outlet for it and comments that the latter “is getting old there.” Since it later appeared in the
London Review of Books
, Buford must