Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Throughout the correspondence surviving from this episode there are frequent examples of Barber’s assiduous advocacy of Munro’s position and her desire to do what was right. Pushing McGraw-Hill Ryerson, which was also wronged by the licence that the Women’s Press had granted without permission to Penguin U.K., Barber wrote:

  I hope you will change your mind about not wanting to “rock the boat.” This contract is highly unfavorable to Alice Munro’s interests. Further, it is not even a contract you yourselves thought adequate. I’ve done business with Women’s Press successfully in the past and hope to do so in the future. But I don’t think that should stop me from trying to right what I see as a wrong. Why was their contract still in effect anyway? The original purchaser of U.K. rights was Allen Lane. I assume somebody at McGraw terminated the Lane contract when their edition went out-of-print. Why wasn’t the Women’s Press contract terminated when their edition went out-of-print? At any rate, so far as we know now, Women’s Press did not receive “prior written permission from the Proprietor” before licensing rights to Penguin. You have no copy of that license and have received none of the money due.

  In September 1983, when Barber was able to send Munro her copy of the termination agreement with “the McGraws,” she wrote, “I consider this document a golden one.” She reported also that the contract from the Women’s Press was coming and that NAL’s was in process (it would yield Munro another $15,000), and she asked Munro to send Diamond a thank-you note. “He really did a splendid job. Of course,” she added wryly, “so did I.” She most certainly did.17

  Another particular concern for Barber were Munro’s royalty statements. Macmillan had been taken over by Gage, which now produced its royalty statements. In December 1983, after Gibson had written her asking for permission to include a Munro story in an anthology called Illuminations, Barber declined his proposal and offered a counterproposal with better terms for Munro. She also wrote, “I’m very sorry if we’ve made your anthology impossible: on the other hand, I can’t in good conscience give away Alice Munro’s work.” She continued: “I must tell you, too, Doug, that the royalty statements we receive from Gage are unacceptable in their lack of information and their incomprehensibility. We have now spent many hours as a result of the latest Who Do You Think You Are statement, trying without success to make sense of it. We are continuing our efforts, but I’ll probably have to write for clarification.” In a postscript note sent just to Munro, Barber wrote that the royalty statements were so confusing that she would “go after them. It’s ridiculous not to send an author a legitimate accounting.”

  This letter set Gibson to work and early in January 1984 he was writing Barber to report on the royalty situation of Who, to send her copies of missing statements, and to try to clarify things generally. In the process he turned up an anomaly that Macmillan saw in its favour – a supposed three thousand dollars’ worth of advance that had not yet been earned by the book. When Barber replied, it was clear that she knew her facts, that she knew her (and Munro’s) position in relation to Macmillan on Who, and that on the question of its royalties she had been made to do the publisher’s work. “It’s a cruel blow to have no royalties,” she concluded. Gibson replied gratefully and amiably, offering to put some money in Munro’s hands by contracting for the next collection then and there. Passing this on to Munro, Barber wrote that she did not yet want a contract, but that Alice should indicate if she did. She continued, “Do you realize that if all goes well, all of your books will be in print in the U.S. next year. What a splendid endorsement of your work! Cheers to you.” Shortly thereafter she wrote again, noting that on a new royalty statement they had just received from Gage there was a mistake in their favour; she had decided to deposit the small cheque “as payment for work on their royalty statements. Send in the cops.”

  In hiring Barber as her agent, Munro found a person much more than equal to her tasks: as these exchanges (and numerous others in the Alice Munro archives) show, she was professional, knowledgeable, persistent, ethical, and very witty. Barber’s reputation as an agent grew in step with Munro’s as an author, so the two careers proved symbiotic, personally edifying, and utterly complementary. Very early on in the relation Barber began signing her letters “Love, Ginger,” and that emotion is palpable in every letter that has survived. When the Alice Munro Garden was dedicated in Wingham in July 2002 Virginia Barber was among those who were there, and among those who spoke. Taking Munro’s own question, “Who do you think you are?”, as her motif, Barber described her as being among “the talented few [who] stick their heads up above the rules and take a fresh look around.” She also reminded her audience that Munro’s writing had not always been appreciated in Wingham, that “it’s not necessarily comfortable up there, outside the box, being stared at and talked about.… I love the irony, the humor, with which Alice Munro often deals with the conflict.” As one of Munro’s best and most enthusiastic readers, Barber certainly knows this well.18

  When Gibson wrote to Barber in January 1984 he also offered “congratulations all round for Alice’s New York Times best book listing.” Moons had been chosen for the paper’s list of the ten best books published in 1983. Its singular success in the United States, complementing as it did Munro’s established reputation in Canada, brought about a marked increase in the number of invitations she received. Munro disregarded university positions; these, however, were increasingly coming from U.S. schools, although Canadian offers still arrived. During the early 1980s she still accepted some reading engagements. She appeared, for example, in Ottawa in February 1983 at a benefit for Interval House, a local community service centre; in March 1984 she read at the David Thompson Centre in Nelson, British Columbia – where she had taught in 1973 – and also at the University of Houston, where Rosellen Brown, another of Barber’s clients, taught; Barber attended. And in September 1984 she participated in a program on censorship at Harbourfront in Toronto called “Freedom to Read.” Offers to contribute specified pieces to various publication projects were continual (for example, Canadian Literature, Chatelaine, Mosaic, Saturday Night, a book on hometowns, another on women and sex), as were requests to blurb books by others. Although Munro was by then well known for her avoidance of such literary chores in favour of her own writing (a CBC radio profile broadcast as she set out on her Canadian Moons publicity tour in October 1982 made a special point of this), such requests continued. She did support writers she knew and whose work she read and respected. She blurbed books by Clark Blaise, Janette Turner Hospital, and Edna O’Brien (“There are only two or three writers in the world who mean as much to me as Edna O’Brien does”) and was offered others; she wrote recommendations for grant support for Metcalf, Carol Shields, and Leo Simpson, among others. Particularly, she helped emerging Canadian writers whose work she liked: just as she championed Jack Hodgins in the 1970s, in the 1980s she did the same for Guy Vanderhaeghe and Jane Urquhart. Occasionally she tried to help an aspiring writer directly, as when she submitted a collection of poems directly to a publisher on the writer’s behalf.

  Prizes of various sorts also came Munro’s way. In 1983 Munro was being considered for the Order of Canada (and Gibson provided background materials on her behalf), the next year Queen’s University offered an honorary doctorate; in each case Munro declined. She won another Gold Award from the National Magazine Foundation for “Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd,” but a special highlight was the Academy Award won by the Atlantis Films production of her story “Boys and Girls,” as best short-live-action film. It was an early success for Atlantis, a small company made up of three recent Queen’s graduates. This award was suggestive of a growing interest in the cinematic possibilities of Munro’s work. The CBC had done “Postcard,” “How I Met My Husband,” and “Baptizing” previously, but during the 1980s inquiries came in for films based on Lives of Girls and Women, “An Ounce of Cure,” “Simon’s Luck,” “Tell Me Yes or No,” and “Thanks for the Ride.” Films of Lives and “Thanks” wer
e eventually made.

  Munro and Fremlin returned to Australia for a holiday between June and October 1983, but for the most part Munro remained in Clinton, dodging as many of these chores as possible in order to guard her time to write. Between her New Yorker bonanzas, 1982 through early 1984 were largely given over to writing. No stories were considered by the magazine between December 1981 and July 1984, but they looked at seven (plus the first revision of “Fits”) between July and the end of the year. These were the stories that so impressed McGrath and became the core of The Progress of Love, her next book.

  One chore Munro did not dodge but rather volunteered for and embraced was the writing of the foreword for a book edited by Robert Weaver and co-published by the CBC and Macmillan. The Anthology Anthology was published to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the radio program. Anne Holloway and Gibson at Macmillan knew that Weaver would do nothing to showcase his own work. So Munro was asked to do it and she readily accepted – her own “The Shining Houses,” read on the CBC in 1962, was the lead story in the collection. An early draft of the foreword begins its closing paragraph with these words: “My personal debt to Robert Weaver is simply beyond measure.” In the published version, Munro describes the bases for this recognition from her first contact with Weaver in 1951 through their first meeting in 1953 and their many contacts since, but she does not detail her own perpetual acknowledgement of Weaver throughout her career.

  This is the other side of the view of Munro as recluse. She seems to have mentioned him in every interview she ever gave, certainly in any that touched on her first publication. While Munro has become famous (or infamous) for avoiding the limelight herself (you have to be “selfish, self-protective” to be a writer, she told Patrick Watson in 1976), she has never hesitated from doing chores involving people who matter to her and to whom she is grateful. Foremost among these people is Robert Weaver. Munro wrote the book’s foreword, was interviewed along with Morley Callaghan by Weaver for the anniversary Anthology program and on CBC-TV’S The Journal, and participated in the tribute to Weaver at Harbourfront. All of this followed her dedication of Moons to him. Self-protecting when it came to her writing, Munro has not stinted those to whom she feels grateful. At just about the same time, when the Malahat Review was putting together a tribute volume for John Metcalf, Munro wrote something for him as well.19

  “I want some kind of purity”: The Progress of Love and Its Progress from Macmillan to McClelland & Stewart

  When the New Yorker editors received three new Munro stories to consider in July 1984, it had been well over two years since they had seen “Bardon Bus.” The new stories were “Gold,” “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux,” and “The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink.” As they tended to do (despite Barber’s best efforts), McGrath and his colleagues set one Munro story against another, buying “Skating Rink” and rejecting the others. “Gold,” a story that recreates the scene of people giving impromptu speeches that Munro and Fremlin saw at the King’s Domain in Sydney, is one of only a few completed Munro stories Barber has not managed to sell. “Monsieur” was bought and published by Grand Street after which it was selected by Raymond Carver for Best American Stories 1986 (he wrote that “for some years, [Munro’s] been quietly writing some of the best short fiction in the world”). The New Yorker editors did pretty much the same thing with the next three stories that they received late in the summer – “Eskimo,” “Fits,” and “Lichen” – rejecting “Eskimo” (“it seems somewhat cryptic and inaccessible”) and encouraging a revision of “Fits.” (“Eskimo” went to GQ-Gentleman’s Quarterly – while Munro revised “Fits” twice to no avail. It also went into Grand Street after other magazines had passed.)

  Just after he sent these back, McGrath received and immediately bought “Miles City, Montana.” It caused a stir at the magazine, as Barber reported to Munro, apparently paraphrasing what McGrath had said to her: “The New Yorker is beside itself over ‘Miles City.’ One of the best you’ve ever written. Wonderful to see your experiments with technique, form – you’re pushing the traditional limits of the short story. No one else is writing stories like yours.”

  It was this run of stories – seven since July – that prompted McGrath’s remark about feeling like Rilke’s editor. In that October 15 letter, he enclosed his edited manuscript of “Lichen.” He was “querying or toning down some of the crotch imagery” and asking for a specific change: “The real magic of this story, it seems to me, is the way it earns and then miraculously effects that transformation of pubic hair into lichen, but I think it should happen effortlessly and almost invisibly – as it does in the photograph – and without the additional reference to the rat between Dina’s legs.” McGrath did not win this point – the rat stayed – but he recognized that with these descriptions Munro “had broken new ground at the New Yorker which has never before referred or alluded to crotch shots. Mr. Shawn said, ‘The central image gave me misgivings, but the writer has earned the right to use it.’ ” Laughing about this exchange, Barber wrote to Munro, “So, you’ve a dirty mind, Alice Munro, but it’s a talented dirty mind and that’s O.K.”20

  When she wrote Munro describing the New Yorker reaction to “Miles City, Montana,” Barber noted that they were just one story away from the magazine’s bonus. Her strategy was to hold back “ ‘Progress of Love’ until they cool off up there. They’re so dazzled by ‘Miles City’ that they can’t be trusted to read for awhile.” Her instincts were right. Just after Christmas McGrath wrote to Munro that “Ginger doesn’t seem to be in the office today, so for once I get to pass along the good news: Everyone here was just delighted with The Progress of Love. It’s a wonderful, brilliant story, and we’re pleased to have it.” This was less than two weeks after he wrote to Barber that Munro “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.” The word about “The Progress of Love” was spreading farther afield, since Close reported a conversation she had had with New Yorker fiction editor Fran Kiernan who was “just ecstatic about” it. These two stories, particularly, garnered the strongest reaction at the New Yorker. Before he had seen “Progress,” McGrath wrote to Munro that “Miles City” was his favourite of the group “because the writing is impeccable.” For her part, Munro told Barber that it was her favourite too, though doubtless she would not have described it as “impeccable” writing. Munro probably would have said that it was “all right.”

  After “Progress” Munro’s success rate with the New Yorker dropped off since the magazine saw four more stories plus two revisions (a second of “Fits” and one of “Circle of Prayer”) but bought only one, “White Dump.” Rejecting “Jesse and Meribeth” in February 1985, McGrath explained to Barber their specific problems with the story: “Though it’s all handled with subtlety and dispatch, we couldn’t help feeling that the substance of the story never really measured up to her skill in presenting it. Or perhaps another, simpler way to put it all is that we’ve just been spoiled by her recent stories. It’s a very high standard we’re holding her to – there is no question about that.” These comments point up sentiments similar to Munro’s own. Just over two years later, when she was working on the stories that became a third “Munro bonanza” for the New Yorker and the core of Friend of My Youth, she wrote to Metcalf about the stories she was working on: “There is an attenuated bleak feeling about the one long story and an untrustworthy facility about two chunky ones. They are not bad. I am feeling rather happy – or content – about my life but doubtful about my writing. I want some kind of purity. Instead I’ve got a lot of technique.” One should not look askance at Munro’s comments here – the New Yorker published five of eleven stories in Progress and eight of ten in Friend – but, that notwithstanding, the 1980s reveal her still as a writer who despite past success viewed each story as a new beginning, a desperate struggle.

  “Jesse and Meribeth” went on to the Atlantic Monthly before ending up in Mad
emoiselle as “Secrets Between Friends.” The other stories the New Yorker passed on followed the same path: “Eskimo” in GQ-Gentleman’s Quarterly, “Deux Chapeaux” and “Fits” in Grand Street, “Circle of Prayer” in the Paris Review, and “A Queer Streak” (published in two parts) in Granta. Barber’s strategy was to try mass-market magazines and only then let stories go to more literary publications that paid. Owing to internal changes, Grand Street paid less than the $5,000 they paid for “Working for a Living” (“Deux Chapeaux,” for example, brought $1,200), but at least these magazines still paid for contributions. With “A Queer Streak” in Granta, too, Munro had her direct first contact with Bill Buford who, under Tina Brown’s editorship, headed the fiction department at the New Yorker during the 1990s. The year 1985 proved, though, to be the last time many of Munro’s stories went elsewhere. Barber recalls that once during the 1980s she was almost pleased to have the New Yorker turn down a story so that she could send it to Michael Curtis at the Atlantic Monthly. He published the two stories in Friend of My Youth that the New Yorker did not.21