Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Running a shop was what my husband knew about (“Merchandising” or “retailing” was the right thing to call that). I had worked in a library. So we said, why not a bookstore? We could sell our house, and move to some small city which had a college, no good bookstores at present, and people who could be persuaded to buy books.

  We took the ferry to Victoria – not daring to tell our children what we were up to – and there was the store, empty and waiting for us. A long, dark, dirty, low-rent store with an old-fashioned entrance deep between two display windows. A tanner’s shed at the back. Once it had been a hat shop.

  We had no money. My husband started in at once, cleaning and painting and putting up shelves. I packed and put the house up for sale and moved the unenthusiastic children to a little rented house across from Beacon Hill Park.

  People told us you couldn’t make a living selling books.

  The fragment substantively captures just what the Munros did. They found a storefront to rent at 753 Yates Street in downtown Victoria, next to the Dominion Hotel, and set about during the summer of 1963 getting Munro’s Bookstore ready for its fall opening. They rented a house at 105 Cook Street across from Beacon Hill Park, within walking distance to the store. Munro continues:

  But we were released, energetic. Blue walls, pegboard and shelves, black and white floor tiles. We made a plan that divided the walls into sections. Philosophy, Poetry, Science Fiction, History, Psychology, Drama, Cooking, Religion, War, Crime, Erotica lumped in with Classics. We went through order lists. We planned to open on the 19 th of September. Boxes of books began to arrive, which wouldn’t have to be paid for till after Christmas. The prim Penguins, orange-and-white and brown and white, the Pelicans blue-and-white. This was to be a paperback store, with the books temptingly face-out around the walls – a new idea at the time. As soon as the varnish on the shelves was dry, we were setting out the books, like separate prizes – salable books on sex and cooking and flying saucers, and others I had ordered simply because I loved the sound of their titles. In Praise of Folly. The Cloud of Unknowing, the Book of the It, Love’s Body, Seven Types of Ambiguity. Beautiful rich covers some of them had, soft colours, designs of birds or unicorns or flowers, or a delicate script. Magical packages. That’s what they seemed to me, and having them fill up the shelves produced an excitement that was giddy and childish and at times hardly bearable.

  Turning back to herself and her situation, the narrator then says that “I had started breathing again, of course. The change saved me, the work, the risk and challenge. Other people’s words, in wonderful profusion, rescued me, for a while, from the necessity of getting out my own.”16

  Just before Munro’s Bookstore opened, a Help Wanted ad appeared on the book page of the Victoria Daily Times. Headed “Part Time Staff for New Book Store,” it continued, “To open soon in downtown Victoria, pleasing personality and wide knowledge of literature absolutely essential, some university training preferable.” The store opened on Thursday, September 19, and the Munros did $125 in business that day – Jim recalls it took them some time to get back to that figure again. During those early days, Jim got to use the ad-writing skills he had learned at Eaton’s: one ad in the Times is headed “ATTENTION INSOMNIACS!” and continues “AT MUNRO’S BOOKSTORE We have books that will put you to sleep.… We also have books that will keep you awake.” It concludes by asserting that Munro’s has “Victoria’s largest assortment of quality and non-quality paperbacks.” A week later, their ad offers “A MEMO TO TIRED EXECUTIVES”: “Stop Re-reading ‘The Moon and Sixpence’ and come down to Munro’s Bookstore where you’ll find plenty of books to give you a new lease on life. We have Victoria’s largest assortment of quality paperbacks on all subjects and WE KNOW BOOKS.”

  Jim’s differentiation between “quality and non-quality” paperbacks here suggests the changes occurring in the book trade just then, which he and Alice knew about and drew on when they opened the store. With justifiable pride he recalls that Munro’s was the first store in Canada to stock City Lights Books from San Francisco, publishers of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and their ilk. In 2004, having celebrated its fortieth anniversary in the massive former bank building on Government Street, Munro’s Bookstore has certainly succeeded and flourished. Quite apart from the link with Alice, Jim Munro and Munro’s Books have been a vibrant presence in Canadian letters in Victoria for four decades.

  But the first few years were difficult ones. They brought Alice and Jim together in meeting the challenge of making a go of the store. Munro has described those first years, from 1963 to 1966, as the happiest years in their marriage: “We were very poor, but our aims were completely wound up with surviving in this place.” The store was open from 9:30 to 5:30 daily, and then again from 7:00 to 9:00. Typically, Jim would be there all day, coming home after closing at 5:30 for dinner. Alice would stay at home in the morning and “do housework and think about writing” and, after she got lunch for the girls, go in for the afternoon, coming home at 4:30 to fix supper. She would always go back for the evening and would also fill in at other times whenever receipts were low to “save on the wage bill.” Working in the bookstore brought Munro out of her natural shyness, and over the years she became quite popular with the regulars. And for their part some of her customers turn up in her stories – “Tell Me Yes or No,” “Dulse,” and “The Albanian Virgin” include a bookstore as part of the plot.

  There was a memorable uniqueness about Munro’s Bookstore, too. Craig Barrett, who represented McGraw-Hill during the late 1960s, remembers his surprise when he first visited the store. Jim was “quite an aesthetic-looking fellow” who made interesting conversation. Barrett had been on the road for about a month, visiting other bookstores most days, but his visit to Munro’s “was the first time I actually sat down with a bookstore person and talked about literature.” He also remembers Alice as “quite gracious.” The three of them would sit down to tea in a back room and “talk about all kinds of things,” though mostly literature. Nevertheless, Barrett acknowledges that to him there was nothing memorable about Alice at the time. As to what books Munro’s Bookstore would buy, he recalled that Jim “made all the decisions.” Alice “wasn’t in on the buying process.”

  Another person who got to know the Munros through the bookstore during its early years was George Cuomo, a writer who taught English at the University of Victoria. He recalls Munro’s as “the best bookstore in town at the time” and, through the store, he and his wife got to know Alice and Jim “quite well. I remember them as pleasant and friendly, and somewhat shy. Alice was lively and animated and full of laughter in small comfortable gatherings and while working in the bookstore.” Cuomo particularly remembers what he calls Alice’s “sweet kindness to our children.” The Cuomos used to allow their two oldest children – then eight or nine – to take the bus downtown alone. If anything were to go wrong, though, or if they lost their return fare, they were to go straight to the bookstore and ask Alice for help. Cuomo thinks they did so once or twice, “and to this day they recall the Alice they knew then with warm good feelings.”

  In contrast to Vancouver, Victoria was much more to Munro’s liking. Again, her notebook draft fragment about the move provides detail:

  Victoria, that summer, seemed to me a town out of the past. I don’t mean that past the tourist parts of the town tried to evoke – an uncertain rather amazing discouraging hodge podge of Tudor and Victorian pretensions, but a past of settled neighbourhoods, shade trees, corner grocery-stores with striped awnings. In the mountainside suburb of Vancouver where we had lived there were no sidewalks, the trees were fir and cedar, behind the nine-foot laurel hedges there was a jungle splendor and the ditches ran full beside the road. Raw handsome houses, a rain-washed luxuriance. Victoria seemed, by contrast, dry and open and orderly and half-familiar, with a field of dry grass sloping up from the sea, the deep shade of the chestnut trees on the street where we lived[.] I could walk from our house to the store.17
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  “I’ve Almost Forgotten I Am a Writer”:

  Earle Toppings, Ryerson, and Making Dance of the Happy Shades

  In November of 1964, writing on Munro’s Bookstore stationery, Munro responded to a letter from Earle Toppings at Ryerson. She began by thanking him for his letter and ended by encouraging him to visit them, noting, “We’re very proud of the store.” In between she wrote, “I’ve almost forgotten I am a writer so it’s nice to be reminded. I am still working at it though. I quit entirely the first year we had the store but I began again last September or October.” Toppings replied immediately, “For some time I’d been afraid you weren’t writing; it is great to know that you are again.” He hoped to make the trip over to Victoria to see them and continues, “With a talent as genuine as yours you must not stop working; but then, a born writer never really ceases.” He concludes, “You know how positively we have always felt about your manuscript of stories. I got it out of the vault again a few days ago and will reread it to touch up my original impressions. During the BC trip we can discuss the possibility of adding to the present MS.”

  This exchange of letters – Toppings was unable to get to Victoria as hoped – began a period during which he, as senior editor for trade books, tried to rekindle the project of publishing a collection of Munro’s stories at Ryerson. The decision was a long time coming since the book was not agreed on until March 1967. In the meantime Toppings stayed in touch with Munro both about the collection and about Munro’s contribution to the Modern Canadian Stories collection that he was working on at the time. The contact was sporadic. Toppings remembers that during this time “it was hard to get a letter from her,” while Munro admits that she has never been much of a letter writer. The manuscript of the six stories Weaver had handed to Colombo in late 1961 thus remained in the Ryerson vault. It was augmented between 1961 and 1967 by new stories from the Montrealer and, in the case of “The Shining Houses,” from CBC Wednesday Night. Two stories that had been omitted from the Colombo group, “The Day of the Butterfly” and “Thanks for the Ride,” were also added. Toppings recalls that they would have a published story in hand and then write to Munro, who would send a typescript version. In this way, the original manuscript grew to twelve stories by the time Ryerson decided to go ahead with the collection.

  During the three years Munro was on Cook Street – they bought the final house they lived in together, at 1648 Rockland Avenue, during the summer of 1966 when she was pregnant with Andrea – she completed just two stories, “Boys and Girls” and “Red Dress – 1946.” Both were published in the Montrealer. Although the correspondence between Munro and Toppings during these years is not complete, surviving letters suggest what happened. In October 1965 Munro reports on a long-anticipated visit to their store by Ryerson sales representatives, writing that “The Men from Ryerson were in – Jim’s feelings were considerably soothed – We just wanted somebody from Ryerson to know we’re here.” Turning to the Modern Canadian Stories anthology Toppings was working on, she hopes “it comes off.” She agrees with Toppings that it would be better to include a story not already in an anthology, so she points to “Dance of the Happy Shades,” “Boys and Girls,” and “Red Dress – 1946.” The latter story is one “which I like but everybody else thinks plain frivolous.… You – or somebody – must decide which to suggest. I sort of hate them all, once they’re written, for being so much less than they were supposed to be.” She signs off, “Yes, I’m still writing.” Toppings replies at once with an explanation of how Modern Canadian Stories is coming together – the academic editor has the final say – and so while other stories have proponents, “in the end, … we may end up with The Time of Death. I think it is the strongest story you’ve written.” As already noted, they made that choice.18

  Ryerson’s publication of Dance of the Happy Shades began to come together in early 1967. In February Munro replies to Toppings, “I’m so sorry – nothing new. Just those – Red Dress is the last story I’ve done.” She notes that he hasn’t mentioned “The Office” and offers to find it for him, something she subsequently did. “I had a baby last fall and with her and helping Jim in the store have been terribly busy, though I’ve started (again!) a novel, which is light & easy & may get finished if I ever get time.”

  Andrea Sarah Munro was born on September 8, 1966. Her arrival coincided with changes in the Munro family’s life in Victoria and occasioned some others as well – given the over nine-year age difference between Jenny and Andrea. The month before, the Munros had moved into their new house on Rockland Avenue, a twelve-room Tudor-style place that had been priced to sell. Munro has said that they were able to afford to buy it for a bargain price but could not afford to heat it. She hated it from the outset; it was a place that Jim and Sheila, then almost thirteen, wanted. She told Catherine Ross, “Once we moved to that house, which we did against my will when I was eight months pregnant, something happened right then. Something pulled apart.” Sometime during the 1970s, Munro worked on a story that, clearly, drew on the acquisition of the house. Once they had some money, the narrator writes, her husband “bought the sort of house which apparently he had been seeking all along – a brick and Tudor-beamed affair set among great lawns and expansive trees, and this house had to be filled with sofas and chairs upholstered in crushed velvet, with a fake suit of armour for the hall, and pictures of stormy seas with little lights over them, and a chandelier which was a copy of one hanging in some castle in England, in some baronial dining hall I never want to see. When I was moved into that house I knew it was not to stay, though I stayed longer than I would have thought, and longer than I should have.”19

  Munro’s letter to Toppings in February 1967 saying that she had again started a novel as he is rekindling the idea of a collection of Munro’s stories both demonstrates her commitment to her writing and obscures the facts of her life just then. Munro ends by saying that “your letter has me very curious. I wish I’d done some stories.” Toppings had obviously written asking after new material. When he replies on March 3 he emphasizes that he “is trying to rekindle a project here” and then asks for the copy of “The Office,” “the one story we’re missing.” He is hopeful but unable to be specific. “Two other editors here, recent additions, have read your stories and are very high on them: joyously so.”

  Andrea’s birth did allow Munro more time at home, but the years while Andrea was a baby were characterized by her mother’s utter exhaustion. Munro had a new baby to care for, was working at the store, and now had a much larger house to tend to, with no help beyond Sheila’s. She told Ross that during this time “nothing in life mattered to me as much as sleep, not sex, not anything. The marriage never regained anything after that.”

  In March 1967 when she sent Toppings a copy of “The Office,” she commented that it “is an example of the Early-Awful period, and it is a good deal better than most. I went through them and was surprised how bad some were.” A week later she wrote again, having heard in the meantime that Ryerson had decided to publish her collection; she is characteristically self-deprecating:

  Well I haven’t got a telegram yet saying you’ve all changed your minds or you thought it was an April Fool’s or anything like that so I guess you are going to publish those stories and I am of course delighted. Did you really mean fall of ’68? I didn’t know things were planned so far ahead and I thought it might be a mistake for fall ’67. Anyway I’m glad its fall because anything can sell then, even a collection of unsexy short stories.

  At the same time, Munro expresses concern about including “that old Chatelaine story,” “Good-By, Myra,” so she sends Toppings “a couple of other oldies to make a choice from, if you think either of them would do better.” She tells him that her preferred choice for it is “The Day of the Butterfly.” One of the other stories she sent for consideration was “The Shining Houses,” which “was just broadcast on C.B.C.[,] never published, and I’d lost the last page of this manuscript but I found a rough copy and
typed it up from that.” Munro also characteristically notes that just “a few things have to be tidied up in the stories you have. For instance, in ‘The Peace of Utrecht’ the punctuation is awful – far too many brackets. I could fix that.” She concludes, moving to her most pressing concern as a writer – the piece she is concentrating on now: “I am hopeful about the novel but get very little time. I think I might be able to do a Great Leap Forward this summer, when my teenage daughter is home to look after the baby, and we have some college girls in the store.… I hope to get a letter from you soon.”

  This period in March 1967 needs to be paused over. Largely through the advocacy of others – Robert Weaver, Earle Toppings, and, in the wings, Audrey Coffin, Munro’s editor for her first three books – Alice Munro’s career as a writer was reaching a moment she had acknowledged as possible but had never much sought out: her first book. Because of its range, its detail, and its precision of emotion, Dance of the Happy Shades would launch Munro as a writer at a level she had not previously known; its immediate recognition through the Governor General’s Award was an external sign of her writing’s appeal, and of her presence as a Canadian writer to be noticed and watched closely. Yet owing to her shyness and uncertainty, this accomplishment was something that seemed to happen accidentally to her. Beyond responding to letters, putting stories in the mail, and following up suggestions, Munro did little to advocate her own cause. She concentrated on the work at hand and let things happen. More than that, in Victoria she was far from English-Canada’s literary centre, Toronto. Thus in writing to Toppings in March 1967, she deprecates her past efforts while looking ahead to the work in progress, the novel.

  Personally the spring of 1967 saw the beginnings of Munro’s “long voyage from the house of marriage.” As her 1970s draft fragment makes clear, the house on Rockland that Jim bought against his wife’s will when she was pregnant was one to which she was never reconciled. Throughout their years together, Jim recalls, Alice was never assertive regarding decorating: “She never made a big fuss about decor; … it wasn’t a big deal with her.” Yet that new house – massive, calling out to be made a showcase home – reawakened the class differences between the Munros that had always been there but had remained mostly submerged in the daily lives. Away from Ontario, making their way, raising a family, the Munros did not have time to dwell on such differences until the late 1960s. By then, too, much of the world was in the midst of the public foment that characterized the decade: Vietnam, riots, feminism, free love, marriage breakdown. Looking back to that time after she left Jim in the Rockland house where he still lives, Munro has commented, “The things Jim and I fought about were often class things, and totally different ways of looking at things. I was not prepared to be at all a submissive wife. I think now, why did I – the fights we had about the Vietnam War! I could have let that go, I wasn’t going to change his mind. But I was very much on the offensive. We didn’t see things the same way.” By the time Dance of the Happy Shades was published in September 1968, Munro’s “long voyage” was well begun.20