After a paragraph expressing her admiration for “Material,” Barber describes the resonance of Munro’s work within her own life. Looking back to the time she was studying “fiction about the artist or the making of fiction” in graduate school, Barber offers an image of herself “changing diapers or scraping egg off plates,” wondering
if Henry James would have changed places with me, allowing me to tell him that it’s “art which makes life” while I dined out the 355 evenings a year in his place. So, I had an occasional sense of “It’s not enough” in my own terms. “Material” put the subject in a perspective I hadn’t seen but which has meant a great deal to me – the one word “authority” calls to mind the whole story for me.
Barber concludes by asking Munro to not “be shy about answering this letter. Let’s begin talking through the mails. And if you have any questions about my agency or background or whatever, ask.” Her final sentences get right to the point: “I’m convinced that there are many people who would value your writing and who don’t know your work – I believe I can help. It would give me much pleasure if you should decide so too.”
Barber’s approach to Munro was apt. Writing from the centre of American publishing, the market Munro needed to get into (since Kiil’s success at McCall’s had shown as much), Barber here is thorough, professional, and knowledgeable. Even more importantly, she is also wry and a bit self-deprecating, revealing herself as a woman with a point of view and sense of humour similar to Munro’s own. With children and years spent scraping egg off plates, Munro could readily relate to Barber’s experiences.
She responded to this letter quickly. Less than two weeks after her first letter, Barber wrote again, addressing her this time as just Alice and beginning, “I’m sending you noisy greetings and the word that I’ve never trusted rumors anyway.” Munro must have raised a question about agents, or about the way they work, since the balance of this letter specifically explains an agent’s standard charges (10 per cent for domestic sales, 20 per cent for foreign) and, in much greater detail, what an agent does and how she could help an author’s career. Barber itemized such duties as matching manuscripts with publishers, negotiating the contract, looking after production, and helping with publicity. “Very often, problems come up along the way – again, the agent helps resolve them.” The agent also handles subsidiary rights, which are often a difficult matter. In addition, the agent acts as “first reader” for the author should she wish. “I know it’s to your advantage to have an agent,” Barber wrote toward the end of the letter, “but before you accept such an arrangement, you should be convinced. No good agent would want a reluctant client. Why don’t you talk with some of your friends who have agents?” Munro had been doing just that for some time; so it is probable that her response to Barber’s first letter was a request to know more about this agent’s sense of her own methods.
Characteristically, Munro was slow to respond. Barber recalls that she sent back a very nice letter thanking her but maintained that she did not need an agent. Responding to this, Barber sent Munro a copy of a just-published first novel by one of the authors she represented, Rosellen Brown’s The Autobiography of My Mother. Munro read the book and eventually decided that anyone who handled such writing was a person she wanted to work with too. Meanwhile, she had doubtless been doing her own homework on Barber. The two women confirmed their arrangement in Toronto that summer, first meeting at a raucous writers’ party at Pierre Berton’s house in Kleinburg. Barber remembers arriving in Toronto and calling Munro to confirm their meeting arrangements from a payphone at the Windsor Arms Hotel. They had their chat, and when Barber hung up change came cascading out of the phone, “just like at the end of ‘Providence’ when the little girl is filled with wonder … life in its potential for largesse and the wonder at the good luck.… But I had to call Alice [back] and tell her – it literally went to the floor, came out of the box and spilled onto the floor.… It was like some slot machine.”
At that point Barber had not read “Providence” – Munro wrote the story in October 1976 – but in calling the author and telling her what had happened, she may well have contributed an incident to that story’s making. By that summer, Munro was working on the Who stories, and “Providence” was among the first seven she sent to New York. Whether the cascading change was a propitious sign or not, the events of that weekend confirmed Munro’s hiring of Barber as her agent. This proved to be a critical decision, for it had almost immediate effects.
Barber’s work on Munro’s behalf began in earnest early in November 1976, once Munro had sent Barber seven stories that were to be the core of Who. Looking back, Barber has commented that by that time Alice “had already done such wonderful work that it didn’t take much of a brain to recognize that this was a great writer.” She set about introducing Munro to New York publishing in a way she had never been presented previously. Having an agent on the ground there was a very different thing from having a publisher, McGraw-Hill, which received her work from its Canadian subsidiary. An agent “has to have faith in her own opinion,” Barber has said, “because she is the front line.” Still in the process of starting out herself, but armed with a writer who had already proved her mettle in Canada, where she was “world famous,” Virginia Barber hit the ground running once she had material to sell. It was more than business; in Barber Munro had found a friend, a person of integrity, experience, and knowledge commensurate with her own. As she asserted when she dedicated her Selected Stories, Munro saw Barber as an “essential support” in fact.11
When Barber first wrote Munro early in 1976, she had little new material on hand beyond “Places at Home.” She had only just retrieved that manuscript from Gibson when Barber’s initial letter arrived. Munro felt that she was “almost fending off her enthusiasm,” because she was worried that she might not write anything else. Still, she was working steadily, and on one level at least, things were coming together. She reported as much to Metcalf just after her great-aunt’s funeral in January. These projects were probably extensions of materials from “Places at Home” (like “Pleistocene,” which she expanded from the initial sketch) or “Privilege,” which Munro recalls as the first of the Who Do You Think You Are? stories to emerge. Despite misgivings, and despite the busy new life she was leading, 1976 proved a busy writing year for Munro. By the end of October she was able to send seven new stories to Barber in New York.
Quite apart from her writing, Munro spent the fall of 1975 settling back once again into the life of Huron County. She and Gerry went on long walks, she canned quarts and quarts of ginger pears, harvested the garden (the tomatoes were a disappointment), went often to the library for Mrs. Fremlin, and generally realigned herself to the rhythms of small-town rural life. There were periodic forays to London, just over an hour away, for readings and parties connected with the university, and they once went to a party given by her sister-in-law Margaret Munro, who had joined a Communist cell. She did not miss the city in any way – there were no Communists in Clinton (though there were Orangemen, who still hated the French Canadians and were opposed to Catholicism in general), and no one there approached her with a manuscript to read. Although she knew that her growing status as a writer made her seem an odd fit with Clinton, no one was fawning over her or making anything of her celebrity, as some people in London had. Even so, back home, she knew that she was thought of as lazy, with no proper work to do, and so something of a family embarrassment, but Munro also knew that such a status in a place she was comfortable in was better for her work.
Fearing boredom for Alice in Clinton, Gerry encouraged her to accept invitations to read and to present herself as a writer. Munro read at Western that fall and in February she went on a Canada Council reading tour through the prairies to British Columbia. (Her reading at Simon Fraser University garnered one of the few really grumpy reviews Munro has ever received, in the Vancouver Sun, from a reporter dismayed that she had nothing new to read and gave no interviews.) The tour w
as followed by a visit to Victoria to see Andrea, who was approaching her tenth birthday. Jim was in a new relationship with Carole Sabiston, an artist, who had a son about Andrea’s age. Later that year, when the divorce was final, Jim and Carole married at the house on Rockland. Andrea came to Clinton for the summer, as did Jenny, who found a waitressing job nearby.
The tension and trouble leading to the breakup of her marriage was now well behind. By the summer of 1976, Munro had settled comfortably into life in Clinton. Walking, gardening, looking after Mrs. Fremlin, Gerry working on renovations to the house, both of them cross-country skiing in winter: “Real life.” Munro was happy with this routine; it felt normal. In April, she and Fremlin told their parents that they had married while on a trip to Ottawa. The story was a saving fiction: the marriage never took place, but it satisfied their parents. By June she was telling Metcalf that the new book was started, though typically she wondered when she would ever get it done.12
On June 9, 1976, Munro was in London to receive an honorary degree from her alma mater, the University of Western Ontario. Numerous others have been offered over the years – from such other universities as Manitoba, Queen’s, and Toronto – but Western’s was the only one she has accepted. She became a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa: “Here,” its citation ends, “is an Alice who, from everyday experience, has created her own Wonderland, making of it a looking glass through which we begin to identify vital aspects of our world and of ourselves.” The singularity of Munro’s acceptance here illustrates her attitude toward such awards. In 1983, for example, she declined an appointment as an Officer of the Order of Canada. Asked about it, she explained that while she had no problem with awards received for particular books or for her body of work, she was uncomfortable with awards recognizing a person by virtue of celebrity. Having studied and excelled for two years at Western as an undergraduate, and having served a year as its writer-in-residence, Munro probably felt that its degree was not as honorific as all that, that she had earned it.13
Late in June Bob Laidlaw’s heart took a turn for the worse. He was admitted to Victoria hospital in London, where tests were done to see if he was well enough to withstand open-heart surgery. If he had the operation and survived it, his circumstances would have been considerably improved; if not, he would be confined to bed for the rest of his life – the prognosis expected just a few months to a year. He passed the tests and decided to have the operation, but because of the surgeon’s schedule he had to return home for three weeks to await the surgery. It was performed in late July but, right after the operation, he suffered a massive coronary; though he was revived, he never regained consciousness. Alice and her sister, Sheila, were at the hospital throughout the ordeal. Finally, on August 2, at the age of seventy-four, Robert Eric Laidlaw passed away. The funeral was somewhat controversial since Laidlaw had specified that there was to be no minister present; instead, his son, William, read a statement his father had written. In it Laidlaw offered goodbyes and thanks, and politely said how he had always thought Christianity was rather silly. He did not want to give offence, but that was just how it struck him. This was news to many who knew him, and some took it badly.
Munro had been scheduled to teach at the Banff Centre for the Arts that summer but, owing to her father’s illness and death, went there a week late. Throughout her growing career, Bob Laidlaw had watched her reach new levels of accomplishment, knew the details of her publication, and felt the brunt of whatever local reaction there was to his daughter’s writing. He celebrated the news of her first published story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” yet he recognized the inadvisability of her use of “Jesus Christ” there, given his wife’s and mother’s feelings. He dealt with the gun-toting man who saw his own family’s history in “The Time of Death” and so threatened him because he was Alice’s father. And on reading the copy of Lives she sent to him, pronounced it “a powerful book and very strong medicine indeed. I sometimes wished that you had not been quite so explicit in the matter of sex but then you have set out to write of a young girl’s growing up, her reaction to that very important part of life, sex.” As Munro has said, her father never offered a word of criticism, for he understood the artist in her.
Well he might. Always a reader, always a thoughtful man, during the last years of his life he had become a writer himself. After a lifetime of hard, physical labour in the bush, on his fur farm, at the foundry, and in the turkey barns, he took up writing, and succeeded well. Between 1974 and 1976 he published six pieces, five memoirs, and a short story, in the Village Squire, an Ontario magazine published in Blyth. At the same time he was working on his historical novel, The McGregors, set between the 1850s (when the Laidlaws first came to Huron) and 1925 (when the county could be seen as settled). In 1974, he told his daughter that he wanted “to bring out the tragedy of reticent people.”
Among Munro’s papers is a brief unpublished manuscript intended as a separate commentary on “Working for a Living.” Munro wrote there that “this story, or memoir, is about [my father’s] working life, and to some extent about my mother’s. But I took him only up to his middle years, when his fox farm had failed and [he] was working in the Wingham Foundry.” She then describes his subsequent work as a turkey farmer and writes that “in the last years – really in the very last months – of his life, he became a writer. He had been working on the first draft of a novel about Ontario pioneer life when he went into the hospital for a check on his worsening heart condition.… When I visited him in the hospital all he wanted to talk about was his characters, and the ways he had thought of strengthening his book.” This was the last conversation the two had. “During the three weeks he had left he produced a second draft that I read with astonishment after his death. He had made a wonderful leap, in organization, in grasp, in love, of his material. His book The McGregors was published in 1979.”
Munro then wonders whether Laidlaw should have been a writer. Such a decision, she realized, “would have been unthinkable, in his family, his community, his time. It would have seemed unmanly, impractical, indecently presumptuous. (It was possible for me because I was a girl and a girl’s choice was not so important, it would all be forgotten when she married and had children[.])” The real significance of these facts for Munro is her realization that “he had at any rate the moments of greatest pleasure in a writer’s life, which come long before publication, vindication, or even completion. I mean those moments when he … caught hold of his story, his creation, with such effort and determination and flashes of power and delight.” Her “memoir” – as she calls “Working for a Living” – was about her father’s working life. Yet, as her commentary confirms, when she wrote of her father’s working life she knew of his writing and, indeed, knew that The McGregors would be published. That is, the communion between writer-daughter and writer-father existed – its feeling is present on each page of “Working for a Living” though emerging first in “Royal Beatings” and “The Moons of Jupiter.”14
Laidlaw’s death became part of his daughter’s own perspective as “Places at Home” was passing into Who Do You Think You Are? Just as her loss of her mother had allowed her to soon take up the “personal material” surrounding her mother’s death in “The Peace of Utrecht,” so too her father’s passing allowed a similar, though much less literal, use of autobiographical materials in “Royal Beatings.” And like “Peace,” “Royal Beatings” proved to be “a big breakthrough story” for her, the “kind of story that I didn’t intend to write at all. That led on to most of the stories” in Who Do You Think You Are? “Royal Beatings” proved to be the first story Munro sold to the New Yorker and the lead story in Who. “The Moons of Jupiter,” a lyric memorial to Robert Laidlaw, grew directly from Laidlaw’s death. Always an interested observer of his daughter’s success, after his death he became an intimate presence in the fabric of her breakthrough stories of the late 1970s and into the 1980s.
A little-remarked scene featuring a character based on he
r father appears in “Miles City, Montana.” Contrasting her background with her husband Andrew’s, the narrator writes that “my home was a turkey farm, where my father lived as a widower, and though it was the same house my mother had lived in, had papered, painted, cleaned, furnished, it showed the effects now of neglect and of some wild sociability.” She also recalls a visit when, home alone with her father just after her mother died and, newly married, just before she was to join her husband in Vancouver, she and her father used a rowboat to rescue turkeys that had been trapped by rising waters from a sudden rainstorm. “The job was difficult and absurd and very uncomfortable. We were laughing. I was happy to be working with my father. I felt close to all hard, repetitive, appalling work, in which the body is finally worn out, the mind sunk (though sometimes the spirit can stay marvelously light), and I was homesick in advance for this life and this place.” That is, she was there at home knowing she would miss that place and her father in the years to come.
“A Cloudy, Interesting, Problematical Light on the World”: “Royal Beatings,” Virginia Barber, and the New Yorker
In late 1984 Munro’s first editor at the New Yorker, Charles McGrath, wrote to Barber renewing her first-reading agreement with the magazine. He did so “with particular pleasure after the Munro bonanza we’ve had these last few months. She is simply one of the finest short story writers alive, and it’s a great honor and privilege for us to be able to publish her.”15 By this time Munro was well established among the New Yorker’s “stable” of writers. Between April 1980 and December 1984, she had nine stories accepted by the New Yorker. She also had ten others that the editors there considered and rejected – in one case, “Fits,” they saw it three times before finally letting it go. By June 2004 forty-seven Munro stories had first appeared in the New Yorker, under four different editors-in-chief – William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and David Remnick – and the numerous changes their goings and comings occasioned. Recalling Munro’s position with the magazine, McGrath has observed that she has been among “the sinews that held the New Yorker together” throughout its many changes. “It’s sort of odd and ironic that this Canadian writer would become a New Yorker mainstay.”
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