Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

will grow, and you’re getting some offers from paperback houses. We’ll know tomorrow, I expect, whether or not Bantam, Penguin or Pocket Books is the winner. There’s no money for us, alas, as the top offer is $3,500. Still, I want the U.S. paperback, and I’ve worked hard for this. You’ll notice I just sounded my own horn, but it’s more out of frustration than pride.”
    Frustrated or not, still worried about various markets, Barber had every reason to “sound her own horn” regarding Munro’s career just then. Whether or not she feared pride, she equally had every reason tobe proud of what she done over the previous four years to ensure its progress. From the time she became Munro’s agent, Barber engaged in building Munro’s career in all possible ways. She attracted the attention of the
New Yorker
and other magazine editors; she arranged book contracts, first with Macmillan and then with Norton and Knopf, and pursued the paperback prospects. She tracked and verified rights questions with an eye always to having them revert to Munro so she could resell them, she kept an eye on royalties, and she fielded whatever offers came in for film rights, translations, or anthologies. These activities came, of course, after she had read Munro’s stories, responded to them, and kept encouraging her author to “Write, girl!”, as she suggested more than once. Tracing Barber’s activities as Munro’s agent – and she was following this same path for several other writers concurrently – one can readily see just why Munro would call Barber her “essential support” in the dedication to the
Selected Stories
. As a friendship blossomed from their initial business relation, Munro and Barber formed a real partnership.
    Bantam was the publisher that won the rights for a mass-market paperback of
The Beggar Maid
in the United States. Such rights questions are indicative of how publishers work; they contract for the original book and then are able to sell the paperback rights and, under certain circumstances, those rights can in turn be licensed to another publisher for another paperback edition. With books in English, rights are usually for the United Kingdom or North America – Canadian rights either subsumed or excluded depending on point of view or predilection. (During the time of Munro’s first books this was a point of contention between McGraw-Hill New York and McGraw-Hill Ryerson.) Such concerns are a necessary preliminary to an incident that suggests just what Barber was able to do for Munro as her career grew. They confirm just why she needed an agent in the first place.
    In September 1982, Barber wrote Munro just after she received Penguin Canada’s paperback offer for
Moons:
    We are still dancing over Penguin’s offer. Peter Waldock [at Penguin] called to say he was “on Cloud 9” and wanted to buy“all Alice Munro’s books.” He wants to publish a boxed set in Fall, 1984. We’re still trying to straighten out the highly confused rights situation on
Lives
and on
Something
. Somebody has licensed U.K. rights on
Lives
to Penguin and so far, nobody I’ve talked to has been willing to confess. We reverted the rights, you remember. I’ve talked with Ryerson, McGraw N.Y., Penguin, NAL [New American Library] here, Macmillan, the Ryerson agent in Toronto and my English agent – and with some of these, there have been several talks. Just don’t want you to think agents sit back twiddling thumbs. I’ll untangle this knot or else! So far it’s been both infuriating and amusing.
    Barber was concerned here for several reasons. The licensing of
Lives
to Penguin in Great Britain effectively meant that any income from it would flow to the British licence holder, then to McGraw-Hill Ryerson, and only then to Munro, each company taking a portion. The fact was that neither Barber nor Munro had granted permission for the licence. When Barber got farther into it, she discovered that neither had McGraw-Hill Ryerson granted permission. With regard to
Lives
and
Something
in the United States, Barber wanted to terminate any connection between those titles and McGraw-Hill, New York and, also, to terminate licences held on them for mass-market paperbacks by NAL .
    Barber’s work reveals something of the network of issues handled by an agent. What she was undoing was a set of arrangements that had failed to address the author’s long-term prospects. Intent on ensuring that Munro’s work stayed in print in