Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  “Sad, Sensitive, and Preoccupied with Detail”:

  The Montrealer, a Possible First Book

  In 1961, when “The Trip to the Coast” appeared in Ten for Wednesday Night, the biographical entry preceding the story ends “Mrs. Munro is now at work on a first novel.” That year, too, in the first newspaper profile focused on her, the author wrote that since “her first success Mrs. Munro has been selling stories to a variety of Canadian publications including ‘Chatelaine’ and ‘Canadian Forum’. Her reputation as a writer of great talent and promise has grown with each story published. Possibly the most surprised, and certainly the most modest, about this success, is Mrs. Munro herself.” Munro’s modesty, during this time and throughout her career, was not based on any uncertainty about her identity as a writer – a writer was what she was, and what she was continuing to be. As she wrote to Weaver when she told him she had not approached George Woodcock for a reference letter to the Canada Council, “I don’t feel so worthless and undeserving as all that.” Her modesty has had more to do with her own shyness and, more pointedly, with her own high expectations for her work.

  During the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the pressure to write a novel and the difficulties it occasioned vexed Munro; when she writes to Weaver in 1959 of “feeling so fertile after the long drought,” or of “a period of considerable depression and uselessness this fall,” Munro’s drought and her depression were brought on by her dissatisfactions with her attempts at the novel form. A novel, long sought, continued as a major challenge during the 1960s. When one was finally published in 1971 as Lives of Girls and Women, that book certainly fulfilled the expectation, if not exactly the form. Throughout these years, as the author of that first profile maintained, Munro’s “output has been very small because of the demands of home and family.”4

  While home and family certainly demanded much of her time – Munro’s life at the time was that of any mother to young children, one of interruptions and other demands – it is equally clear that she was struggling with fictional form: “I was trying to find a meaning,” she told Jill Gardiner in 1973. What this meant, practically, was that as a writer of fiction Munro was trying to write the novel that others were encouraging her to do. At the same time, as “The Peace of Utrecht” confirmed, Munro was beginning to discover material that was working at a deeper, more personal, level in her stories than she had previously. Thus as she tried to find her way into a novel that worked, Munro was also writing the stories that would prove to be the core of Dance of the Happy Shades.

  The year 1959 is indicative of Munro’s changing focus. When she was working on “The Peace of Utrecht” during that summer she was also at work on “A Trip to the Coast” and “Dance of the Happy Shades” – “feeling so fertile after [the] long drought,” she told Weaver. Two of these stories – “Peace” and “Dance” – felt to Munro “like the first real stories” she had ever written. (“A Trip to the Coast,” ironically given its connection with these two, is a story she now says she really does not like.) “Dance of the Happy Shades,” in contrast to “Peace,” does not much draw on personal material. It owes something to a music teacher named Miss McBain who taught Jim’s aunt Ethel; it derives its setting from Munro’s summer as a maid in Toronto and her visits to Oakville, and it gets its characters from there and from Munro’s time in suburban Vancouver.5

  But while “Dance of the Happy Shades” is a significant story because of Munro’s view of it, and it is obviously prominent as the title story of her first book, the circumstances of its initial publication as her first contribution to the Montrealer bear comment.

  The Montrealer (1924–1970) was a monthly magazine focused on the English-speaking society in the city that, certainly into the 1960s, was the cultural and business centre of Canada. English was its language. The Montrealer styled itself “the magazine for discriminating Canadians” and throughout its history it was characterized by good writing, though it was not especially literary until the late 1950s, when the editor, David Hackett, began publishing serious fiction. Hackett, an American, left the magazine to work on John Kennedy’s presidential campaign and in May 1960 he was replaced by Gerald Taaffe. He also was an American who had emigrated to Canada in 1951 and had worked as a journalist in Quebec City; he wrote fiction as well. He found himself both editor and staff (though there was some help with layout and circulation) and with a budget of a thousand dollars per issue for all costs – journalism, fiction, cartoons, everything. During his time on the Montrealer – Taaffe was there until December 1965 – he had to do freelance journalism to support himself.

  Taaffe took over the Montrealer intent on continuing Hackett’s practice of publishing fiction, and as a writer of fiction himself, he wanted to get the best possible. On his arrival in 1960, he went through the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts (it was over a foot high, he recalls) and found just one piece he wanted to publish – a story called “Dance of the Happy Shades.” It was, unfortunately, unsigned. In order to identify its author Taaffe canvassed his Montreal contacts, to no avail. He also wrote with his inquiry to writing magazines in the United States; they published his letter and, after some months, he heard from an Alice Munro in Vancouver identifying herself as the story’s author. Taaffe immediately bought it and published it in his February 1961 issue. Munro herself had not seen his letter. The Vancouver poet Elizabeth Gourlay saw it and, having heard the story broadcast on Anthology in October 1960, remembered it as one of Munro’s. She contacted Munro, whom she did not know, and the two developed a friendship. When she sold “Dance” to the Montrealer, Munro took Gourlay to lunch.6

  “Dance of the Happy Shades” proved to be the first of five Munro stories and one memoir (“Remember Roger Mortimer,” February 1962) that Taaffe published in the Montrealer between 1961 and 1965. As such, only the New Yorker has exceeded this count; the Tamarack Review also saw six pieces by Munro, but it did so over a much longer period. “Dance” was followed in the Montrealer by “An Ounce of Cure” (May 1961), “The Office” (September 1962), “Boys and Girls” (December 1964), and “Red Dress – 1946” (May 1965). Except for the first, all are rooted in Munro’s personal experience – what she calls in the Struthers interview “the real material.” These five stories, along with the three that Munro wrote during 1967–68 to complete her book manuscript – “Images,” “Postcard,” and “Walker Brothers Cowboy” – are among the strongest stories in that book.

  Once he found Munro, Taaffe was clearly taken by her work. After already publishing two stories in 1961, he wrote Munro in August. Noting that it “is a long time between your stories” he admitted that he wanted to encourage her, saying “I enjoyed the last two” stories and he is hoping to stimulate her to submit “more work to The Montrealer.” He also suggested that she might try “to write a good personal travel essay” but if “this doesn’t work, perhaps you are experimenting with a new approach to fiction.… At any rate,” he promised, “you can be sure of an appreciative reception of anything you send.” Evidently, Munro responded quickly, since less than two months later Taaffe writes her apologizing for his “delay in reporting about your ‘Remember Roger Mortimer’, which I can use in February, and for which I can pay $75.… It was a very good personal essay, and I was particularly pleased to see that you have kept the same basic style as that you use in your fiction.” In June 1962, Taaffe wrote to Munro about “The Office,” telling her of its publication date and adding that he “liked the rewrite quite as much as I did the original version, which is a good deal.”7 He had in fact received a revision he had not asked for, one Munro decided to do on her own. This pattern was often repeated in later years when she was publishing in the New Yorker. Although her editor might be satisfied, Munro was not.

  Also during 1962, Taaffe did a freelance book review for the CBC program Critically Speaking, another of the group of programs produced by Weaver. The book under review was The First Five Years: A Selection From “The Tamarack Review” edit
ed by Weaver and introduced by Robert Fulford. It was published by Oxford University Press. Taaffe asserts that

  somehow Alice Munro strikes me as the most typical of the Tamarack writers, although she would probably be the last to claim first place among them. Her story in this collection is “The Peace of Utrecht”, and a single sentence, chosen more or less at random, should help situate it. I quote: “On the hall table was a bouquet of pink phlox, whose scent filled the hot dead air of a closed house on a summer afternoon”. Miss Munro’s sentence, like her story, is sad, sensitive, preoccupied with detail, as bleak as a ramshackle prairie town – it is written with painstaking perfection.8

  Taaffe’s enthusiasm for Munro’s writing is another key to her growing reputation as the 1960s began. Equally, Munro’s submission of an unsigned “Dance of the Happy Shades” is telling. Although Weaver remained her main literary contact, she was becoming known through the impressive qualities found in her prose rather than through personal connections or self-promotion. Taaffe was delighted to buy whatever writing he could get from Munro. He recalls her later stories commanded his top rate ($150 to $200), a sizable portion of his monthly editorial budget and a fee he also paid to such better-known writers as Norman Levine and Mordecai Richler. Thus the five Munro stories and personal essay that the Montrealer published between 1961 and 1965 are a reflection of Taaffe’s enthusiasm. He paid Munro as much as he could and ran the stories as she sent them, without editing. Taaffe left the magazine at the end of 1965 and the Montrealer faded until it ceased publication in 1970.9

  During the late summer and into the fall of 1961 the possibility of a book of Munro’s stories was suggested for the first time. Three publishers – Appleton-Century-Crofts, McClelland & Stewart, and Ryerson Press – saw a proposed manuscript of five or six stories and Weaver, who of course helped to orchestrate the possibility, was prepared to do “a book through Tamarack Review if all else fails,” as he wrote to Munro in August. While it is impossible to be certain, the manuscript likely comprised “The Time of Death,” “Sunday Afternoon,” “A Trip to the Coast,” “The Peace of Utrecht,” and “Dance of the Happy Shades.” “An Ounce of Cure” was probably the sixth story. In his August letter to Munro, Weaver reported that “the stories have just gone to Jack McClelland” since “he says that he is at least interested in the idea of publishing perhaps half a dozen of the stories and I think he should be given a chance now to make a firm decision.” Weaver then details the interest expressed by Appleton-Century-Crofts in New York. David Watmough, an English writer who had immigrated to Canada and settled in Vancouver in 1960, appears to have been an intermediary between Munro and the American publisher. A long paragraph by Weaver demonstrates his thoroughgoing attention to Munro’s situation:

  Where does this leave you with Mr. Watmough and his firm in the United States? This sounds to me a little like a fishing expedition on his part since they would have a very tough time introducing a completely unknown short story writer to an American audience and in any case the firm isn’t really all that active in fiction. I think I also agree with you that a smaller book might be a better idea for a beginning. I think perhaps you should write to Watmough and tell him that six of the stories have actually been submitted to McClelland and Stewart who have shown at least some interest. You might offer to get in touch with him as soon as you have heard from Jack or me, or you might offer to send him a few of your stories just as long as he keeps in mind that there is a formal investigation going on somewhere else. If he really wants the book, who knows but that he might then get in touch with McClelland and Stewart and of course that would do you no harm. In any case, try to be a little evasive right now and keep him on the string.

  Following Weaver’s suggestion, Munro apparently sent some stories to Appleton-Century-Crofts since little more than a month later its editor-in-chief, Theodore M. Purdy, wrote to express interest in Munro’s stories but to encourage her toward a novel as her first book.

  Striking the same chord about two weeks later, Jack McClelland wrote about her five stories: “We have read them here with interest and appreciation but have some real doubt as to whether it makes sense to issue them in book form at the present time.” He then explains at some length, providing examples from his own list including Ten for Wednesday Night, just why he thinks story collections do not sell, and so “don’t make a very good start for a writer.… Thus our view would be if there is any hope of your completing the novel in the next year or so, let’s leave the short stories and publish the novel first in book form. By all means, publish the short stories in periodicals. Sell as many as you can and as widely as you can. But what about the novel? How is it progressing? Can we be of any help? Do bring me up to date on the situation.” Deft publisher that he was, McClelland tempered this by leaving the door open a bit: “If the novel is too far in the future and you are very anxious to have the stories published in book form, just say so and we will reconsider the matter.” A month later Munro talked by phone to Hugh Kane, McClelland’s second in command, who later wrote: “I was very glad to have the opportunity to talk to you this morning and happy to learn that you agree with us that publication of your short stories should follow rather than precede the novel on which you have been working.”10

  These publishers’ letters – the assumptions they contain, the questions they ask – are worth pausing over as they relate to Munro’s career as she moves toward Dance of the Happy Shades. Pronounced in her first newspaper profile “the least praised good writer in Canada” by one of the country’s leading cultural journalists, championed by Robert Weaver of the CBC and the Tamarack Review (who was then broadcasting three more of her stories and seeking more for Tamarack), Munro in late 1961 was verging on a book. It was her logical next step. But though her stories were very well regarded, a novel and nothing but a novel was what was wanted by the public and by the publishing business. And from the late 1950s on through the 1960s, a novel was what Munro tried to produce, though she never could do so to her own satisfaction. While she had made various attempts at novels throughout this period, it is noteworthy that “The Death of a White Fox” – in its various guises, a long short story, really – is the only surviving narrative of any length in the papers at Calgary beyond preliminary material for Lives of Girls and Women. Some of the material from other attempted novels later emerged as stories – “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You,” or “The Found Boat,” in her second collection – but much of this work was presumably abandoned or destroyed.

  Just after Munro spoke to Kane in mid-November 1961, Weaver wrote her saying that “Ryerson Press wants to see the five short stories since they are trying to find some work by younger writers and obviously intend generally to improve their publishing program. I am going to assume that you won’t mind and send the five stories to a friend of mine at Ryerson Press.” In the same letter, Weaver also suggested that “if you get a story done which you feel is one of your better ones, why don’t you make a concerted attempt to publish it in one of the better U.S. magazines?” Munro had been doing this for several years, though without any success. Weaver offers to provide her with a list of magazines and adds both sympathetically and perceptively: “I don’t know quite what to say to you at the moment about the novel problem, but if you don’t feel anxious or even capable of writing a good novel right now and do feel ready to keep on with the short stories, I’d spend the winter on shorter fiction.” Here is yet another example of Weaver’s thoroughness in his support and advice to Munro – he is pressing on with the book possibility, and acting on it; he wants her to try new magazines for the exposure they might provide; and he is well aware of Munro’s aesthetic predicament, balanced between her innate inclination to write short fiction while the market, and a part of herself, wants a novel. And in the earlier letter in which he advises Munro on how to respond to David Watmough, Weaver concludes by saying that “I’ll see about an agent in October when I’m in New York.”

  What th
is last comment suggests is that during the fall of 1961 Munro and Weaver were investigating a variety of ways to advance Munro’s career. This was a time when few Canadian writers had agents and, even in the United States, those who did had them just for book publication. Most short story writers still dealt directly with magazine editors, an arrangement that persisted into the 1970s. Yet here Munro is, implicitly at least, investigating that possibility through Weaver, one that continued to arise from time to time until she hired Virginia Barber as her agent in 1976. Here too Weaver is counselling her to nurture her talent for short fiction, sensing that Munro might not really want to write the novel everyone seemed to expect and, in any case, might not even be capable of it. As she has said of her writing generally, but of this period of her career in particular, and her various attempts at a novel, writing is “just constant despair.”

  Looking back on the whole of her career, Munro has also said that “at a certain point I need somebody” to respond to her writing. From the early 1950s through the 1960s, Weaver was most certainly that person, and Munro needed and valued his direct personal critique and support throughout these years. But as the 1960s passed, it is clear that Weaver’s support involved his reaching outside his own sphere of control into book publishing as Munro’s career developed with his careful and persistent help.

  Weaver’s friend at the Ryerson Press was John Robert Colombo. Colombo was an editor there from 1960 to 1963 and had worked on Tamarack, where he first became aware of Munro’s writing. He recalls receiving Munro’s manuscript from Weaver and reading it with the sense “that here is writing of quality and character.” As a result he urged the press’s editor-in-chief, John Webster Grant, “to write to the author to offer to publish 1,000 copies of the work.” Grant did this, but some time before the fall of 1962 Colombo followed up that letter by writing to Munro himself, saying, “We are eager to publish a collection of – say – ten stories, if you feel the time is ripe.” He then names the six stories he has in mind – the full group – and notes also a recent “strong story in the Montrealer [that] would make a suitable introduction to the other stories”; that story was “The Office.” Colombo also asks if there is unpublished material. As with her apparent reaction to McClelland, here too Munro did not press – in fact, Colombo recalls her “resisting Ryerson’s offer to add ‘Dance’ to its next list” during 1962–63.