Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

arrangement in Toronto that summer, first meeting at a raucous writers’ party at Pierre Berton’s house in Kleinburg. Barberremembers 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 retrievedthat 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