Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

Looking at the manuscript remains of “Places at Home,” it is easy to see why Munro and Gibson decided that the text she wrote could not be properly linked to a series of attractive photographs. Munro really needed the sort of photographer she had imagined in Lives: “The pictures he took turned out to be unusual, even frightening. People saw that in his pictures they had aged twenty or thirty years. Middle-aged people saw in their own features the terrible, growing, inescapable likeness of their dead parents; young fresh girls and men showed what gaunt or dulled or stupid faces they would have when they were fifty. Brides looked pregnant, children adenoidal.” Important to this connection is “Clues,” the final vignette in the manuscript and one which – along with the first, “Places at Home” – Munro saw as having an absolute position. There she describes what one sees in a “little glassed-in porch”:

  A calendar picture of a kitten and a puppy, faces turned toward each other so the noses touched, and the space between them formed a heart. The dates were not current, the calendar was eleven years old.

  A photograph, in colour, of Princess Anne as a child.

  A blue mountain pottery vase with three yellow plastic roses in it, both vase and roses bearing a soft film of dust.

  Six shells from the Pacific coast.

  The Lord is My Shepherd, in black cut-out scroll sprinkled with glitter.

  An amber glass cream jug, from Woolworth’s probably, a bunch of flowers in it that a child might have brought – roadside weeds, buttercups, big coarse daisies, white and purple money-musk, even a couple of dandelions.…

  Newspaper photograph of seven coffins in a row. Two large, five small. Father, mother, five little children. All shot by the father in the middle of the night a few years ago in a house about five miles out of town. That house is hard to find but many people have persisted, asking directions at a gas station on the highway and then at a crossroads store[.] Many people have driven past.…

  Some blue and yellow paper birds, that look as if they were cut by the wobbly hand of a six-year-old child, but were cut out in fact by Ella herself, with her curled arthritic hands, and strung on little sticks the way it said to do, in the paper. A mobile. She made it to have something moving to look at it … and sure enough the birds are bobbing encouragingly, even on so close a day, riding on undetectable currents of air[.]6

  Munro’s awareness (and perhaps emulation) of Wright Morris’s The Home Place is readily apparent here. Following him, she is focusing on materials that, separate and stark, stand out in her mind, each an image embodying a story. But unlike Morris, who took his own photographs depicting such images from his own rural Nebraska childhood, Munro was working with a photographer who, however he might try, did not share her stark vision or her sense of personal story of Huron County. When in January 1975 Munro wrote to Metcalf that she might be doing the book with D’Angelo, she recounted a conversation with the photographer in which she said the text would neither be bland nor suitable for Reader’s Digest. It certainly is not: “Places at Home” is both starkly Munro’s own response to her home place, as well as a harbinger of what she would be writing in the years immediately to come. It points the way toward a new-found, sharply defined, and precise use of her material – no longer away from Huron County, Munro began in 1975 to write there with a longer, deeper perspective, one rooted in its soil, expansive, and bent on discovering “the rest of the story” in such images as are found in “Clues” and throughout “Places at Home.”

  When Munro wrote to Gibson at the end of 1975 acknowledging the decision to abandon “Places at Home,” she also said that she was “into a new book, just shaping. I think it will work.” Gibson circulated this letter to his colleagues with the annotation “I shall write soon with a formal offer to publish.” Since he had met Munro in late 1974, Gibson kept at his suit. He sent her another formal offer for a contract in early February 1976. Meanwhile, he kept in touch, sending her books, asking her to blurb one by Harry Boyle and another by Jack Hodgins. His letters continued through 1976 and, during the spring of 1977, he told her that Macmillan was willing to publish Robert Laidlaw’s novel The McGregors. By then Who Do You Think You Are? was emerging as a collection. Macmillan, however, still had no contract with her. Having received Gibson’s second “formal offer to publish” in February 1976, Munro wrote back about a month later asking Gibson to send back the manuscript of “Places at Home,” “that unusable text for the photographs.” It was “the only complete ms. of that I’ve got, and I’m thinking of doing something with it,” she told him. Regarding Gibson’s offer to publish, she thanks him for his “kind words” and leaves it at that. He returned the manuscript a few days later, commenting that “there’s a lot of good stuff in there” that he hopes she can put “to good use.”7

  While it might be possible to see Munro’s behaviour as coy in the face of Gibson’s protracted wooing, such an interpretation assumes a certainty about her ongoing writing that, though quite clear in retrospect, was by no means clear to Munro herself at the time. Gibson’s continuing suit between late 1974 and spring 1978 – when he finally secured a contract with Munro for Macmillan – served as foundation for the working relationship that was formalized then and has been sustained ever since.

  In March 1976 a second wooing began, that pressed by Virginia Barber. In each instance, though, editor and agent were after an author who, because of the changes in her life since 1973 and especially since moving to Clinton, was not at all sure that she would have material for the one to publish and the other to sell. Recalling this time, and Barber’s offer in particular, Munro has said that

  I was terribly frightened that I was going to be a total disappointment, because at that time I thought I … may never write another thing and what I do write will never sell. I just was almost fending off her enthusiasm. I felt so low in hope, and it wasn’t that I was low-spirited, I was fine, I wasn’t depressed, but I just had these ideas. Maybe it’s because I write stories and between every story there’s a kind of break before the next one. That isn’t always true, but that’s the way it was then. And I had entered into this new relationship that had taken a lot of my energy.

  Among Munro’s papers is a single sheet, a list of titles called “Places at Home,” that lists “Pleistocene,” “Airship,” “The Boy Murderer,” and others. In addition, it lists titles later used in Who Do You Think You Are? – “Half-a-Grapefruit,” “Privilege,” and “Providence.” There are also other titles that probably represent working titles for stories that ultimately were published in Who or had been written by then: “Father” may have been “Royal Beatings”; “Norwegian Lover” may have been “Accident”; and “Simon and Children” may be connected to “Simon’s Luck.” Munro also listed “Married People,” a story that was never published. Though just a single, undated sheet in her hand, it nonetheless confirms the emergence of Who Do You Think You Are? from “Places at Home.” Given the imaginative adjustments brought about by her return, Munro took some time finding her way into her next book as she settled in with Fremlin and his mother in Huron County.8

  When Munro moved to Clinton in August 1975, she and Gerry Fremlin did not see it as a permanent arrangement. She joined in with his plan to look after his mother, hoping to get her situated at home and the house fixed up, before moving elsewhere. Munro remembers saying, on a walk with Fremlin during the summer of 1975, that she did not think she was going to write any more, that she would “find something else to do.” So initially she was not especially concerned with establishing a regular writing routine in Clinton. Such feelings aside, during that autumn Munro struggled with “Places at Home” and, despite her misgivings, found herself beginning a new story that became “Privilege,” the second story in Who. Remembering this moment and the uncertainties she then felt, she has mentioned that

  when I came home that time I was interested in something different about the county. When I was in British Columbia, writing about home, it was just like an enchanted land of your childhoo
d. It was very odd to say that Lower Town was the enchanted land, but it was. It was sort of out of time and place. And then when I came back I saw this was all happening in a sociological way, and I saw the memories I had as being, in a way, much harsher, though they were never very gentle, actually.

  She was stirred by a “new interest in [these] harsher” memories, and that interest led to the stories she wrote during 1976, among them “Privilege” and “Royal Beatings.”

  During 1976 Munro also worked on a television script, for CBC, entitled “1847: The Irish,” for a series called The Newcomers/Les arrivants. She wrote the screenplay, which was revised, and the episode was shot during the summer of 1977. It was broadcast in January 1978. Munro later returned to the material and changed the screenplay into a story, “A Better Place Than Home,” which was published in 1979 in a volume drawn from the entire series. Focusing on an Irish family’s story of emigration to Canada during the Potato Famine exodus, her story was based on research rather than personal materials (her own Irish ancestors having emigrated to Canada well before 1847). A comment she makes in draft notes about the piece catches the effect, and certainty, of her knowledge once she had finished her work for the script: “There can’t be any spectacular ‘Making it’ in the new land because they usually didn’t get that far; they remained mostly working-class, lower middle-class, or proud poor farmers. (Never mind Timothy Eaton).” But her protagonist, who remembers her own difficulties in emigrating to Canada, “speaking in 1900, would see her family’s survival, their modest occupations, as a source of great pride and satisfaction. (I’m sorry, but I think it inevitable with a family of this size, at that time, that some would have gone to the United States and ‘done well’: but one of them is seeking his fortune in the opening of the Canadian West.)” Like “Places at Home,” this writing proved to be useful later, since some of her later writing from the 1980s on has been based on such research.

  During 1975–76 there was much more to Munro’s life than writing. As her recollection suggests, she faced considerable imaginative change in returning to Huron County, to the people and culture she had been born into and still very much knew as her own. She was concentrating on developing her new relationship with Fremlin, but there were many other connections as well. They were living with his mother, so Munro had to deal once again with familiar gender-based cultural assumptions – as a woman she was expected to look after the housework, despite Fremlin’s willingness to participate, and all the more so since she was not “working.” There was also the fact that she and Fremlin were not married but living together, something that did not sit well with either person’s parent. Munro was seeing her stepmother and father in Wingham then too, and Bob Laidlaw’s heart problems were persisting. His health was in decline.

  Then there was the place itself. Maud Code Porterfield’s funeral in January 1976 was held during a major blizzard. It created considerable difficulty for the family as they returned from the cemetery, reminding Munro of the physical struggle that was part of winter in Huron. But winter had its consolations. She and Fremlin often cross-country skied, and did so at night. On one such occasion Munro remembers coming upon a group of indefinable shapes covered with snow. What were the shapes under the covering? They strained to make out the reality. Ultimately, they realized that they were looking at wrecked cars strewn about a field. That haunted moment later became the basis for the same realization in her story “Fits,” a story rejected by the New Yorker (three times), but first published in Grand Street, and ultimately included in The Progress of Love. This rooting of “Fits” – a story that is primarily about the imaginative effects of a proximate murder-suicide – in an evening cross-country outing with Fremlin suggests the progress at work in Munro after she moved back to Huron County: once the “enchanted place of her childhood,” Munro now found in Clinton a place equal to her mature imagination, a place familiar yet mysterious. Seeing it anew upon her return she found in its mysteries and suggestions the very stuff of life itself. Despite her characteristic uncertainties, new stories soon emerged.9

  “I Wonder If You’ve Considered a Literary Agent?”: Virginia Barber

  The foreword Hugh Garner had submitted to Ryerson for Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968 included two paragraphs describing the market for short stories in Canada during the late 1960s. Though Audrey Coffin excised them from the published version, they reveal what Munro confronted as a short story writer in Canada:

  The commercial magazine used to be the natural home of the short story, but today only one national consumer magazine, Chatelaine, remains as a market for classic short fiction. Canadian Home Journal, Liberty, National Home Monthly, and Mayfair died, The Star Weekly, Maclean’s, and The Montreal Standard’s successor Weekend gave up short fiction. Only one, Saturday Night, publishes a couple of short stories a year, as part of a commercial deal with a tobacco company. Today’s apprentice short story writer must rely on the quarterlies such as Tamarack Review, the college quarterlies, Canadian Forum, and other low- and non-paying publications.

  Munro knew this market vividly from her experiences throughout the 1950s and 1960s and, as Kiil’s placement of four of her stories in McCall’s (plus another in Chatelaine) during 1973–74 demonstrated, she also knew that her work appealed to well-paying consumer magazines in the United States. But despite submitting stories to these magazines since the late 1950s, and having Kiil do so during the time she was successful with McCall’s, Munro had not been able to succeed with the New Yorker, the premier venue for short fiction in North America, nor with its competitors there.

  All that changed in 1976. Munro had been approached by literary agents before and, especially after the complexities surrounding Something, she had made inquiries regarding their utility. Still, she had taken no action, characteristically hesitant about such major shifts. Few Canadian writers had agents and, conversely, there were not many Canadian agents. Margaret Atwood hired hers, Phoebe Larmore, after being pressed to get one by Peter Davison, her editor at Little, Brown – he thought she needed one. Larmore has represented her since. Probably sometime in late 1975 Atwood told her that Munro was a writer who might be interested in an agent and she may also have mentioned Larmore to Munro. In New York, Larmore had friends who were also agents, among them Virginia Barber, who since 1974 had run her own agency. A similar sort of discussion took place between Larmore and Toivo Kiil in Toronto in 1975. In December she wrote to him recommending Barber as a possible agent for Munro as one of three writers he had suggested who needed agents (Harry Pollock and Carol Shields were the others). Her associate had been reading Munro’s work and had recommended that Barber write to Kiil directly and introduce herself. Though Kiil was no longer at McGraw-Hill Ryerson, he continued to play a role in Munro’s career.

  Barber wrote to Kiil introducing herself in January, indicating that her main interest was “good fiction.” “I have a Ph.D. in American Literature (Duke Univ.) and was teaching literature before becoming an agent. It is very difficult, as you well know, to find quality fiction that is also commercial enough to attract a publisher, but that is indeed what I’m looking for.” She had read Munro’s work and would be “very pleased to work with her.” Barber then listed several recent books she had represented and concluded, “I’m being highly selective at this point about taking on new clients, but I’ll always find room for someone of the caliber of Alice Munro. Therefore, I hope you will think of me if you know of good Canadian writers who are seeking American representation.” In a postscript, she added that even though she had had her own agency for less than two years she had good co-agents abroad and lists them.10

  Characteristically, Virginia Barber was forthright in presenting herself. Born and raised Virginia Price in Galax, Virginia, a small town about twice the size of Wingham in the Blue Ridge region, her family was socially prominent and Presbyterian when most others there were Baptists. Segregation was still a fact then. Her father was a retired federal civil servant and they be
longed to the country club. Like Munro, she was academically accomplished and also was encouraged by the people of Galax who recognized her accomplishments. After high school she attended Randolph-Macon College for Women and then Duke University where she earned a Ph.D. in English with a dissertation on William Carlos Williams’s poetics. At Duke she met and married Edwin Barber, a Mississippian, and the couple moved to New York in 1959, where he worked as an editor in publishing, first at Harcourt, Brace and then at W.W. Norton. They had two daughters and, after some time spent teaching at Columbia University Teachers College, Barber became an agent through her friend Helen Merrill. Initially she worked with Merrill in the theatre, but, given its “weekend meetings, midnight decisions, and wild temperaments,” she decided to set up her own agency and concentrate on prose writers.

  At the time she wrote to Kiil, Barber’s agency shared office space with Larmore on Greenwich Avenue in New York. Although Munro emerged as an especially attractive prospect for Barber, she was interested in other Canadian writers as well, for her agency was relatively new and growing. The first writer Barber wrote a scouting letter to when she became an agent was Clark Blaise, who already had an agent; but at one time or another she has represented Marian Engel, John Metcalf, Carol Shields, Aritha van Herk, Rudy Wiebe, L.R. Wright, and others. Barber and Munro met at a gathering of the Writers’ Union of Canada in Toronto in 1976.

  Barber first wrote to Munro in March 1976: “Dear Alice Munro, I wonder if you’ve considered a literary agent?”, she began and, even before introducing herself, continued to assert that “I believe your work should be represented by someone, and I would very much like to be that someone. I’ve been thinking about this for some time and have talked with Robert Stewart, Joyce Johnson, Phoebe Larmore, Alma Lee, and I wrote Toivo Kiil, telling him of my admiration of your writing. It’s time I wrote you.” Barber’s letter is itself a tempting text, since she presents herself precisely, carefully, and effectively. The people she names here – two New York editors, Atwood’s agent, a person involved in the Writers’ Union, and Munro’s nominal editor – were all known to Munro. Barber had done her homework. Her primary interest was “good fiction” and she sketched her background in much the same way she had to Kiil although, tellingly, she added, “I’m married (my husband has been an editor for 17 years, so I was around the business before I was in it) and have two children.”