Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

does not formulate her point as a portentous question, she lets the gesture speak enigmatically. Like Del, the reader is left with this Bobby Sherriff, an apparently harmless refugee from the madhouse, living and being. He feeds her cake and chats about diet one summer morning as she awaits her scholarship results. In her imaginings he embodies the tragic Sherriff family that has served as model for the Halloway family she had created before. Yet up close he seems, she realizes, to be so very ordinary, even pathetic.
    Munro wrote another version of the epilogue right after she sent Coffin her letters of January 19 and 20. Uncharacteristically at that time, she dated it – January 24, 1971. It contains a notable description just after the photographer is described which, though later deleted, follows from Del’s realization that she had not “worked out” just why Caroline’s eyes were white in the class picture taken by the photographer. “I had not bothered to work out anything” in the novel, Munro wrote, “what I had were pictures, names, phrases. Sometimes I wouldtry to write down bits of the story, a description or conversation, but this was always a mistake; what was so inadequately done marred the beauty and the wholeness of the novel in my mind.” This was just what was happening as Munro struggled with finalizing the text of
Lives of Girls and Women
as the book was being prepared for publication. “Epilogue: The Photographer” was transforming Del’s story in two important ways: the Sheriff/Halloway novel is another version of Munro’s own
Charlotte Muir
composition. The book’s story offers more than just a girl growing up; as Munro said, it became a portrait of an artist as a young woman, a fledgling artist just as Alice Laidlaw was herself in Lower Wingham and Wingham during the 1940s. Unlike Del, she then had no boyfriend and she did receive scholarships to carry her away from Wingham. But speaking directly to Munro’s own demands of her fiction, this draft paragraph defines her sense that whatever is on the page never reaches the beauty and perfection she imagines for it. Thus changes must, always, be made to the manuscript at hand, as long as is possible. Munro has always done so, she does yet, to the dismay of her editors.
    To be sure, changes continued to be made to the manuscript as
Real Life
moved toward publication by McGraw-Hill Ryerson in October 1971. While Audrey Coffin was still Munro’s editor, the editor-in-chief of the trade department, Toivo Kiil, also became a presence in shaping Munro’s career for both
Lives
and for her next collection,
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
. Born in Sweden and raised and educated in the United States, Kiil had come to Canada to do graduate work in English; he joined McGraw-Hill in 1968 in sales and, after the Ryerson takeover, was put in charge of the trade department. Given the public controversy surrounding the sale of Ryerson, the new company was understandably the focus of particular scrutiny from Canadian nationalists once the sale was completed and McGraw-Hill Ryerson was created. Primarily a publisher of textbooks, McGraw-Hill Canada had little reputation as a publisher of fiction or other creative work; taking over the new company’s trade department, Kiil wanted to change that, and he saw Munro’s work as having considerable sales potential both in Canada and, through McGraw-Hill in New York, in the United Statesand in the United Kingdom. Thus while Coffin remained Munro’s manuscript editor, Kiil became very much involved in the marketing of her work. He handled contractual matters with Munro directly and worked with McGraw-Hill in New York in the hope of producing American editions of
Lives
and
Something
. As a way of enhancing her work’s reputation in the United States, since she did not have an agent working on her behalf, Kiil sold first U.S. serial rights to some of Munro’s stories to American magazines and looked after matters having to do with subsidiary rights (book clubs, film, large-print).
    Kiil sent Munro a contract for
Real Life
on March 10, commenting that he considered “it a great privilege for our company to have this opportunity of working with an author of your standing.” He summarized the contract and said that he “was almost certain that Audrey will be working with you on the copy editing of the manuscript” and that he was looking “forward to working with you on the preparation