Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives by Robert Thacker

Author:Robert Thacker [Thacker, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-8468-3
Published: 2013-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

In this, his first letter to Munro as her New Yorker editor, McGrath was at pains to explain the magazine’s editorial procedures. “What I propose to do – with your permission, of course – is to undertake some preliminary editing.” This would involve points where alternative expressions might be used and others where additional information would be helpful. “One of the story’s strengths is the way it moves so easily back and forth in time – in fact, it seems to work as memory works – but, even so, I think there are a few places where events tend to run together.” The “only possible difficulty” he foresaw was that “Mr. Shawn, the editor-in-chief – who, by the way, likes ‘Royal Beatings’ a great deal – has questioned, on the ground of ‘earthiness,’ both the paragraph on toilet noises on page 3 and the rhyme about pickled arseholes.” For his part, McGrath did not think “the toilet-noise passage is absolutely essential to the story” but conceded that the “pickled arsehole” rhyme might be. He says he is prepared to argue her case with Shawn, “though I can’t guarantee that I will win. I do think we can reach some compromise, however, and troublesome as it may be, I hope you will try to understand our position in this regard.”

In closing, McGrath details the various steps on the way to publication, including payment once the story is set in type. The New Yorker pays on a word rate, so the author cannot be paid until a story is set in type and the word count is established: “We never pay less than a thousand dollars, though, and my guess is that ‘Royal Beatings’ would bring at least two and probably three times that much.” After encouraging Munro to call him (“collect, of course”) to let him “know whether or not to go ahead,” he concluded that “Royal Beatings” is a rare and wonderful piece of work, and “we will be honored if you will let us publish it.” For her part, Munro says that she had never heard of Shawn and thought that people in New York might be making him up. Such a view is not far-fetched: despite his long association with the magazine, Shawn’s name had never been published in its pages to that point.18

“Royal Beatings” appeared in the March 14, 1977, issue of the New Yorker. McGrath lost the battle about bathroom noises (Munro reinstated the paragraph in Who) but he “was able to win the point about ‘arsehole.’ ” By that time the magazine had bought another story, “The Beggar Maid,” and had considered eight more, ten if one counts revisions of “Pleistocene” and “Spelling.” Barber now feels that it took her too long to learn not to send the New Yorker Munro’s stories in groups. While Munro has for many years written in spurts and sent her stories in clusters, the act of submitting more than one at a time seemed reasonable at first. However, editors

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