Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Once Earle Toppings had secured the firm’s commitment to publish the stories, Ryerson Press had to assemble a manuscript and prepare it for publication. Toppings worked with Munro to add to what they had; once they had committed and the stories were arranged, Audrey Coffin was assigned to edit it. One of the new editors who was, as Toppings wrote, “joyously” enthusiastic about Munro’s stories, Coffin got the job because of her keenness. She became the first of Munro’s three important book editors. A contract was drawn up sometime in 1967 – Munro was to deliver the manuscript to Ryerson by June 6 – but it was not executed until June 1968. Even then there was no title indicated for the book. In the clause stating that no part of the work has been published before, Munro wrote, “All of these stories have appeared in magazines.”

  Although she may have hoped that would be the case for all the inclusions, it was not for two of them – “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” which opens the volume, and “Images,” its third story. When she was assigned to edit the book at Ryerson, Coffin wrote to Munro “saying that they needed new stories.… I remember writing back to her saying, you know, I’ve got a five-month-old baby, do you expect me to write three new stories? And she wrote back and said, yes.” Surprisingly, between the time Ryerson agreed to publish a collection and its publication, Munro wrote three new stories for the collection, “Postcard,” “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” and “Images.” She wrote them, in that order, during 1967 and into the fall and winter of that year. “I remember Andrea was pretty small, because I used to wash the diapers every day and I would put them in the dryer and that would heat up the work room. That big house was terrible to heat, and [when] Jim and I moved in there, we didn’t have any money.… That’s why I worked in the laundry room, because the dryer would heat and that was when I was doing a daily wash.” This laundry room, which seems to have entered legend as a symbol of Munro’s feminist struggle, is a large room on the second floor of the Rockland house. It has ample windows; there is nothing basement-dank about it. Carole Sabiston, also an artist and Jim’s second wife, has used it as a work room, too.21

  Late in 1967, Earle Toppings left Ryerson for a freelance career, so Audrey Coffin became completely responsible within the house for Munro’s book. But though he had left the press, Coffin consulted him as it progressed – on all of its details, really. Thus while he may have been gone, Toppings was still quite involved. Early in the new year he wrote to Munro offering to show her new stories – “Postcard” and “Walker Brothers Cowboy” – to editors in Toronto, not as an agent but as an intermediary, leaving her to negotiate fees herself. He also wanted to write a radio play based on “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” and worked on it with Munro’s acquiescence, though nothing came of it.

  Toward the end of March, Munro sent Coffin “Images,” saying, “I don’t know if this will do. I intended typing a fair copy but find I must work the remainder of this week so I have just made a few corrections and send it as is.” She says she has another story started but intends to “open it up and just let it develop the way it wants to and, who knows? I may get the novel I want out of it.” Closing, Munro expresses her misgivings: “This story I’m sending may have been done too quickly & with too many distractions to have jelled properly but at least it’s something.” The next week, she sent Coffin some snapshots of herself (“They look a bit cheerful for a writer, that’s all”) and responds to Coffin’s questions as to the book’s title. Walker Brothers Cowboy and Dance of the Happy Shades were the house’s main choices, although Munro also suggested “Trip to the Coast.”22

  About the same time, Coffin wrote to Hugh Garner, another Ryerson author of some reputation then, who had volunteered to write a preface to Munro’s book because he knew her stories, liked them, and wanted to help. Given the general wariness about short story collections by little-known writers, Robin Farr, the new editor-in-chief, agreed to the idea. So did Munro. Coffin told Garner that she “was pleased to hear that you have very kindly offered to do a foreword to Walker Brothers Cowboy, stories by Alice Munro, which I am editing for Ryerson’s fall list.” She expected “one or two more stories from Mrs. Munro at the end of March and shall then hope to go quickly into production.” She hoped to receive his foreword in the near future. Coffin then provided Garner with the scant biographical information she had and copies of some manuscript stories. He had his foreword to her within a week’s time and also voted for Dance of the Happy Shades as the better of the two titles. Coffin edited the foreword, excising two paragraphs on the market for short stories in Canada (which Garner suggested as a possible cut), and sent it to him for his approval. She also confirmed to him that she thought Dance of the Happy Shades: Stories by Alice Munro would be the title.23

  In writing to Coffin in April, Munro offers something of a coda on her own approach to fiction: “I don’t see the need for a preface. A foreword is plenty. What can you say about your own work? You don’t really think about why you write a story. You write it, you hope it works, it’s finished. Somebody else can see far better than you can, what it is you’re trying to say.” In the same letter, Munro returned Ryerson’s standard author form and added “some autobiographical stuff on a separate page.” It read:

  I was born and grew up in Wingham, Ontario, attended the University of Western Ontario, married and moved to British Columbia. I have three daughters, aged fifteen, eleven, and two (Sheila, Jenny, Andrea, respectively). My husband owns a bookstore in Victoria, where we live in a big old house with an antique furnace and a garden the tourist buses try not to notice.

  Dance of the Happy Shades: Stories by Alice Munro with a foreword by Hugh Garner was published by the Ryerson Press in September 1968 in a first edition printing of 2,675. The book is dedicated to Robert E. Laidlaw. Robert Weaver wrote the jacket blurb. Besides the foreword, it contained fifteen stories written between 1953 and 1968. The managing editor sent Hugh Garner his copy on September 24. Alice Munro was launched.24

  “The Wife of the Man Who Ran the Bookstore” Wins the Governor General’s Award

  After they opened the bookstore, the Munros naturally enough came into contact with people connected with the University of Victoria such as George Cuomo and his wife. At the time the city of Victoria was small and quiet; it had a distinctly English quality about it – more English than the English, some said. High tea at the Empress Hotel was a well-known ritual, as it still is. The old-country influence during the early 1960s was widespread. When Munro came to write about opening the bookstore, the paperback lines she remembers are Penguin and Pelican. At the university, and in the English department in particular, the British connection was amplified since many, if not most, of the faculty were Commonwealth or British types, people who had got seconds at Oxford or Cambridge and ended up in this desirable but backwater corner of the colonies. There were also a few Canadians and a few Americans, among the latter Cuomo. He taught American literature and was the first person to offer creative writing at Victoria; in 1963 he published his first novel, Jack Be Nimble. Alice and Jim, he recalls, knew “the writing types.” Their bookstore, which Cuomo remembers as the only one in town, was “well-stocked and run in a friendly way by people who liked books.” Alice was frequently there, but Jim was always on hand – he was clearly the dominant figure of the two, then, though both were shy. The Munros socialized with the Cuomos and with others from the university, mostly in dinner gatherings of about ten people, some held at the Munros’. Cuomo recalls that Alice was “somewhat in awe” of the people from the English department, owing to her own lack of a degree and the evident British mannerisms of many of them. At these events she was likely to sit quietly and listen while vigorous discussions were going on around her.

  At some point Alice told Cuomo that she wrote, so he offered to look at something of her choice. He did, and though he does not remember that it was “Boys and Girls,” one of the two stories she wrote during her time on Cook Street, he recalls liking it very much. So he “asked her if she would be
interested in coming in as a guest and presenting it to the students” in his advanced creative writing course. (Cuomo has no recollection of Munro volunteering that she had published by then; when he was told, in 2004, of the extent of Munro’s prior publication by 1964 he was astounded.) Cuomo had begun with an introductory course but then had arranged for the better students in the class to do a workshop. This was the class Munro visited, probably in late 1964 or early 1965. Cuomo recalls thinking that it would be good for his students “to be introduced to the work of a mature and significantly more advanced writer. I also felt that it would be encouraging for Alice to have these bright youngsters read and, as I innocently expected, be dutifully impressed by her work.”

  “It was a mistake,” Cuomo now says. “For whatever reason they were highly critical of the story and not the least impressed.” The students were “unduly harsh.” He wonders if they resented an outsider, introduced to them with obvious enthusiasm by their teacher, but as the class progressed he found himself directing the discussion in a way he seldom did, trying to get the students to see what he valued in the story; by the end, he had brought most of them around. “Alice, though, was clearly hurt” despite Cuomo’s attempts to cheer her up afterward. In a draft of an essay written over two decades later, Munro vividly recalled the incident, writing that up to that time, her “almost only contact with writers at the University of Victoria had been limited to a painful session with a man who told me my work reminded him of the kind of thing he himself had been writing when he was fifteen and had abandoned with the first glimmerings of maturity.” This man was Lawrence Russell, one of the undergraduate members of Cuomo’s workshop. Ultimately he became a creative writing professor at Victoria. While Cuomo does not remember Lawrence being especially harsh in that session, no more at least than others, he recalls him as “bright and sharp” and concedes he could be acerbic. When she recounted this incident in her memoir of her mother, Sheila Munro wrote that Lawrence “attacked the story savagely, saying it was something a typical housewife would write.” She also maintains that her mother could not “write anything for about a year after this incident.”

  There is no doubt that her visit to Cuomo’s workshop affected Munro deeply. To this day she recalls Russell’s comments and scoffs at his claim that he has no recollection of it. In fact, remembering it, Munro used the words “savaged” and “destroyed” for what Russell did, but then added, “It was good for me. All those things are good for you. After that I really had great respect for people like Lawrence. But I always thought he might be wrong.” Obviously, he was. For his part, Cuomo offers an explanation that seems to capture Munro’s attitude toward the critical act in some fundamental ways. He called her reaction to his class “delicate” – that is, while she was able, in an impeccable way, to judge her own work – to know what she had done and where it was going, he could also see that at this point she had no experience listening to criticism. She was not used to it and she was not prepared for the give-and-take of a workshop. Munro lacked the “editorial mind” necessary to critique another person’s work and improve it. Whether Cuomo is exactly right, and whether all this could have been seen in just that one session forty years ago, are open questions – perhaps even “open secrets.” But there is no doubt that Munro’s visit to Cuomo’s workshop helped to confirm her lifelong scepticism about the putative teaching of writing. When, between 1973 and 1975 Munro found herself needing to undertake such work in order to finance her independence, and then again for other reasons in the late 1970s and 1980, she did so with considerable embarrassment, not at all believing in the process.25

  In the same essay in which she recounts her encounter with Lawrence Russell, Munro asserts that, in Victoria in the mid-1960s, “I had absolutely no status as a writer.” While that was certainly true in Victoria at the time, Munro’s name was becoming increasingly well known to the small coterie of people who watched alertly for emerging Canadian writers. When Dance of the Happy Shades appeared, many in this group acknowledged their prior awareness of her. Advertising in the Toronto Globe and Mail’s book section, the Ryerson Press ad asserts this prior status, describing Munro as “an author who is just beginning to reap the acclaim she has so long deserved.” Dorothy Bishop in the Ottawa Journal wrote in December 1968 that “astute critics have for some time been placing [Munro] among the handful of our best younger writers of the short story,” and Kent Thompson, reviewing the book on CBC radio in May 1969 after it had received the Governor General’s Award, said that before the award “Mrs. Munro’s work was known only to that Canadian literary community which reads the small literary magazines.”

  The public reception accorded Dance of the Happy Shades changed that unalterably. On the October 19 broadcast of the CBC’s Anthology, writer Leo Simpson reviewed Munro’s book along with Alden Nowlan’s Miracle at Indian River, pronouncing himself to be “totally impressed by … her artistry.” What struck him was “the breadth and depth of humanity in the woman herself, and the beauty – the almost terrifying beauty – she commands in expressing it.” Looking back at this review now, Simpson’s prescience is evident, for after noting Munro “came upon [him] unawares,” leaving him “all the more astonished and delighted,” he asserts that “she is already a writer of what I suppose can be called … an international interest. Her work is in basic humanity, and it makes seas and nationalities subordinate to her vision. She is of larger-than-Canadian interest too, in the nature of her talent itself, I believe. Her talent is immense, and disciplined.” Simpson then goes on to declare Munro better than Irish writer Edna O’Brien without taking the comparison very far. In later years Munro’s work shared the pages of the New Yorker with O’Brien’s.26

  Prescient and perceptive, Simpson’s early review encapsulates the various newspaper reviews Dance received during the fall of 1968 and into 1969. Sheila Fischman, en route to a distinguished career as a translator of French literature, wrote in the Globe and Mail that “Munro’s sensibility … makes common experiences become unique but universal expressions of something of what it means to be alive – children’s parties, high school dances, traveling salesmen and the banal agonies of young love.” Fischman sees Munro’s use of her native Huron County as comparable to the invocation of the American South by such writers as Carson McCullers while, in the Regina Leader-Post, an anonymous reviewer sees parallels to James Reaney’s writing. As these comments suggest, many reviewers paid special attention to Munro’s evocation of her home. One of the Victoria reviewers addressed the importance of setting to Munro, “since very little happens in her stories,” while the other is reminded of W. Somerset Maugham by Munro’s “economy of style, observation, polish, and perception”; like him too, Munro “is a completely honest writer, neither adding nor subtracting for effect.” But unlike Maugham’s work, there is no cynicism in Munro’s stories. Helen Tench in the Ottawa Citizen echoed one of Garner’s phrasings (“ordinary people in ordinary situations, living ordinary lives”) when she exclaims, “And what a collection it is – sparingly but superbly written, about ordinary things that happen to ordinary people.” Jamie Portman, in the Calgary Herald, commented that “the Ryerson Press does not publish very much fiction these days, but what it does issue merits attention and respect.” Dance, he noted, is “a sometimes brilliant and always impressive collection.”27

  The only Canadian review even remotely hesitant, let alone negative, was by Hilda Kirkwood in the Canadian Forum. She takes up Garner’s assertion that Munro is one of “the real ones”; demurring, she details her preferred individual stories, leaving others alone. Apart from this review – which also considered two anthologies, one of them Weaver’s second selection of Canadian stories in which Munro has two stories – the magazine and literary quarterlies were uniformly effusive. Writing the “Letters in Canada” essay in the University of Toronto Quarterly, Gordon Roper maintained that Munro’s “sensitivity to a wide range of individuals, of feeling, and of situation and place is remar
kable, and she conveys her awareness with a sure sense of touch that seems effortless.” Kent Thompson, this time in the Fiddlehead, likened Munro’s technique to James Agee’s and noted that “she has a remarkable command of detail and nuance. She has an ability … to set details in tonal relationships to one another and thereby effect a mood out of a ‘simple’ description.”

  Toward the end of his foreword, Garner calls the book’s contents “women’s stories” and, relishing this in Canadian Literature, Audrey Thomas takes on this “fatuous conclusion.” She writes that in Munro’s stories “the tone of these stories is curiously detached and un-feminine, un-emotional and un-involved. And the work is never sentimental or sentimentalized.” That, Thomas thinks, may even be a weakness: “One is almost aware, sometimes, of the writer consciously holding herself in, too much afraid that if her voice becomes passionate, even for a moment, she will be accused of writing ‘women’s stories’ and told to get thee to Chatelaine, or the Ladies’ Home Journal.” Thomas also observes admiringly that “it might be possible to love Mrs. Munro for her sentences alone, they are so carefully considered and so beautifully in balance.” John Peter, a South African who taught at the University of Victoria and was one of the founders of the Malahat Review, wrote there that Munro’s prose “is a model of fastidiousness and precision.… Yet it is the human content of the stories that matters most,” he continues, “and in many of them this is so sensitively handled that it beggars the imagination to try to suppose them in any way improved.… This is a book for the English-speaking world, and will hold its own against all comers, from anywhere.” And in Queen’s Quarterly, writer David Helwig comments that Munro’s “art consists of an expansion inward, rather than outward, the discrimination of tone and language that makes a small event within a provincial society an important human matter.”