Two critical notes often struck in these reviews had to do with the book’s appearance and with the usefulness of Garner’s foreword. Peter begins his review noting the “book’s ugly jacket” and its “posturing introduction” and Joan Phillips in the St. Catharines Standard similarly begins by saying that “if ever there were a case for not judging a book by its cover” this is it, since “this outstanding collection” of stories is hidden behind “such an unappealing and uninspired, even downright ugly, dust jacket and binding.” In the same vein, another commented that this book’s designer must have previously done geometry textbooks. Beth Harvor, in an overview of Canada’s women writers in Saturday Night, sees the foreword as unfortunate: Munro is “damned by extravagant praise” from Garner, who then “seizes the introduction and makes it into a soap-box from which to attack younger writers and other forms and styles they work in.”28
In March 1969 Munro heard from Robin Farr at Ryerson that Dance of the Happy Shades was among the nominees for a Governor General’s Award. Canada’s leading literary award at the time, it had a mixed reputation. In his review of Dance John Peter expressed a commonly held view that, for a book to receive a Governor General’s Award was “an artistic kiss of death.” Munro recalls visiting a bookstore looking for Dance after it had won. When she asked for it, no doubt shyly, she was told by the owner that he did not keep those Governor General’s books in his store – they did not sell. Originally an award without monetary prize, $1,000 was added to the honour some years before Munro’s win. By the time of Dance’s nomination the prize was $2,500 and a specially bound copy of the book. In 1969, for the first time since the awards began in 1936, the names of all the nominees were announced by the Canada Council a month before the award ceremony. Moreover, when they were presented in May 1969 by the governor general at Rideau Hall, the prime minister of the day, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, attended for the first time. The English-language jury, which had to select 1968’s three best books, irrespective of genre (a comment on how few Canadian books were published annually in those days), was made up of the novelist Henry Kreisel of the University of Alberta, critic and translator Philip Stratford of the University of Montreal, and Robert Weaver as its head. Just as he was going to withdraw from any discussion of Dance of the Happy Shades because of his long connection to Munro and to her book, Weaver was told by the other jurors that it had won.
“Literary Fame Catches City Mother Unprepared,” the Victoria Daily Times wrote on receiving the news of the award. Playing the domestic theme to the hilt, the reporter began the piece with a scene of the Munro family at breakfast, the older girls getting off to school and Andrea sitting at the table, “crying because she isn’t getting any attention.” Munro then asked, “Have you got a camera that will hide circles under the eyes?” to which the unnamed reporter comments, “Life can be turmoil when one wins one of Canada’s top literary awards.” “I didn’t think I had a chance,” Munro told the reporter; “the award usually goes for a novel, not a collection of short stories.” The article was accompanied by a picture of Munro holding the telephone to her ear and, in many ways, it well illustrated the amazed tone of much of the personalized reporting on the prize. The Globe and Mail said that she is “described as a ‘shy housewife’ with three daughters [who] helps her husband run a bookstore in Victoria.” The Vancouver Sun offered “B.C. Mother of Three Wins Top Literary Award” while the other Victoria paper, the Daily Colonist, left the children out of it with “Victoria Woman’s Book Wins Literary Award.” In the smaller Ontario papers, local connections were noted: the London Free Press story was headlined “Ex-Wingham Resident Wins Literary Award” while a paper near Jim Munro’s home preferred the headline “Oakville Man’s Wife Wins Literary Award.” Closer to home, the day after the award was announced, the secretary of Victoria’s Bank Street PTA sent Munro, one of its members, a letter of congratulations.29
In what was probably an indication of the times – the turbulent 1960s, which, in Canada, saw the rise of separatism and “Trudeaumania” – Munro was the only Governor General’s Award winner that year not from Quebec. Leonard Cohen, Munro, and Mordecai Richler were the winners in English while, on the French side, Hubert Aquin and Marie-Claire Blais each won for a novel and Fernand Dumont for a sociological study. Evidently, the juries were prepared to reward youth – only Dumont had turned forty. As the Globe and Mail headlined its story on the awards, “The Establishment Beware! These Awards Are With It.” There was also controversy at the awards ceremony that year, since Aquin, former president of the RIN Québec indépendance party, refused his award on political grounds – the first Quebec writer to do so. So too Leonard Cohen for his Collected Poems. His reason was different, however: “The poems won’t permit it,” he said.
But Munro’s stories certainly did permit the award, as well they ought, given all she had put into them, and into countless others over the years. Alice and Jim travelled to Ottawa to receive the prize. She is mentioned and pictured in the press coverage of the event, which was on May 13, but most of the journalistic attention is focused elsewhere: on the empty chairs reserved for Aquin and Cohen, on Richler (who won for two books and complained at receiving the same money as those who had written only one), and on Prime Minister Trudeau, who came to the celebration to the stunned pleasure of Munro’s family. Bob Laidlaw and his new wife – he had married Mary Etta Charters Laidlaw, the widow of a cousin, earlier in 1969 – attended, as did Munro’s sister Sheila and Jim’s parents. Meeting Robert Weaver there, Alice’s father was able to thank him for all he had done for her over the years. When asked years later about the effect of this first Governor General’s Award, Munro laughed and said,
It did a lot for my prestige in the family. I was living with my first husband when I won the first one and my being a writer had never been … well, I think to that point they were thinking of it as something I would get over. So my whole family was very proud. My parents-in-law were proud. My father was astounded. And so it did something for them, it did something for me. And it was after that I would tell people I was writing, and that it was a thing which I did, which occupied my time, and before that I would never mention it.
So it does do a lot for you in that way, which is not to be sneezed at, because you have to survive in this world.30
“To Know You Have Gotten through to Somebody”
When Ryerson published Dance of the Happy Shades, one of its publicity announcements referred to Munro’s book as a major “publishing event that will bring her national recognition.” It certainly did. And the Governor General’s Award it won, especially as a first book, and a collection of stories at that, crowned that attention. Her father may have been astounded, but so too were the people who knew Munro in Victoria, the people who came into the bookstore and the writers and professors at the university who knew her socially. Very few of these people were aware that she wrote. Once the award was announced and Munro went to Ottawa to receive it, though, newspaper profiles of her as a writer at work began; over the many years since, they have continued, waxing and waning according to publication, but never ceasing altogether.
One of the first profiles not connected to either Dance or the Governor General’s Award appeared in the Victoria Daily Times in August 1969; after accounting for the book and its award, the writer turned to their effects:
Then Alice Munro found she had become a celebrity being interviewed by established celebrities such as radio’s Betty Kennedy, television’s Elwood Glover and critic Robert Fulford. The Globe and Mail magazine discussed her; this month’s Saturday Night magazine analyzes her work.
It’s not surprising that she says the last thing she wants is more publicity!
Yet there is her growing readership and too many unanswered questions. People want to know in which magazines they will find her work. They ask why she writes and what she writes about, or how long she has lived in Victoria.
With her award money, the writer reports that Munro “i
ndulged in the luxury of renting a fisherman’s cottage on quiet Gabriola Island and has been spending some writing hours there. Currently she is taking a break from working part-time in her husband’s bookstore on Yates Street.” Even so, “Alice Munro says she leads a normal life.”
Munro did rent an island cottage for a time, saying that she “had some things to work out” with her writing, although she recalls thinking that she did not get much done since she had her daughters with her. Less pressing, but implicit in Munro’s decision to go to Gabriola, two hours north of Victoria, was a growing sense of dissatisfaction with her marriage.
Munro’s “normal life” was changing. She offered an anecdote that has become well known, involving her reply to the person taking the 1971 Census of Canada. She says that when asked her occupation she replied “writer” instead of “housewife” for the first time. It was an exhilarating idea to her. While this most certainly happened and provided a moment of revelation for Munro herself, the transformation it embodies – from a little-known writer whose work was valued by a coterie of literary types to public writer and celebrity – began with Dance and its Governor General’s Award. As she told Earle Toppings in a 1969 interview after the award, once she published her book and it garnered attention, she began receiving mail about her work for the first time. That had not happened when her stories were only in magazines. Munro found this to be “very encouraging and this is one of the best things” about publishing a book, to hear from readers and “to know that you’ve gotten through to somebody.”31
In this same interview, Toppings asks Munro about her connections with other writers since she lives out there on the west coast, so far away from Toronto, Canada’s cultural and publishing centre. She replies that she really is not connected to other writers and, anyway, “I never want to talk about writing much when I’m doing it.” While that was certainly so to this point in Munro’s career – Robert Weaver remained her primary literary connection, although now she had the people at Ryerson – all that also changed with Dance and the award. Through it, Munro had “gotten through” to readers, to be sure, but she had also reached other writers, and three of these connections had real effects on Munro’s subsequent career.
In September 1968, just as Dance of the Happy Shades was being printed, CBC Tuesday Night broadcast the last story Munro wrote for the book, “Images.” Among its listeners was a young writer in Montreal named John Metcalf. He was born in England in 1938 and after university studies there had emigrated to Canada in 1962, teaching first high school and then at Loyola College, now part of Concordia University. Impressed by the story, Metcalf decided to write Munro and tell her so. He knew Earle Toppings and obtained her address from him; in passing it on, Toppings warned Metcalf that he might not get a reply, such were Munro’s habits as a correspondent. When he wrote, Metcalf promptly told Munro what Toppings had said.
In “Images,” Metcalf recalls, he saw that Munro “had done exactly what I was groping towards and she was there ahead of me.… But what I was trying to do, what she did, you could sum up in the title she gave to the story, ‘Images.’ Because this was what we were both trying to do at the time, which was to lessen the intricacies of plot and move a story forward by a succession of powerful images that had flowing in them, in common, a kind of common energy, but they would be extraordinary vivid.” The story “moves forward in sort of nodules of picture or dialogue.” “Images” and “Walker Brothers Cowboy” struck Metcalf as being technically radical, “extraordinary and demanding, very difficult.… It was such a technical feast for me, so when I read her I was thinking, ah, that’s how you do that.” Metcalf points as well to the narrator’s account of the family’s financial decline toward the beginning of “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” calling it “the most incredible manipulation of voice I’d seen on a page in a very long time.” Besides finding her address and writing to Munro, Metcalf says he bought an armload – seventeen, he remembers – of copies of Dance of the Happy Shades and gave them to friends saying, “Read this book.”
Munro later called the letter she received from Metcalf in 1969 “a bouquet, a burst of handsome praise. He had taken the trouble to do this – to write so generously and thoughtfully, to a writer he didn’t know, a writer of no importance, no connections. He didn’t do it out of kindness alone, though it seemed to me so wonderfully kind. He did it because he believes writing is important.”32 Earle Toppings’s comment notwithstanding, Munro replied to Metcalf and they began a correspondence that led to what Munro called a “literary friendship.” Such a phrasing, which Munro comments “sounds to me too pretentious and genteel for the letters we wrote,” does not really capture the importance of this connection for her. Over the next several years, owing to the extended dissolution and breakup of her marriage in 1973 and her return to Ontario, her friendship with Metcalf was something of a second literary lifeline for her. Coached by Metcalf, Munro spent a brief period – from 1972 through the fall of 1975 – supporting herself by way of her writing and by playing the public writer to a degree she had not before nor has since. During this time, Metcalf was an important literary friend.
At the time he first wrote to Munro, John Metcalf was himself freshly embarked on a career as a writer of short stories, novelist, editor, and anthologist. Later, especially as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, he gained notoriety as a critical gadfly, waging a campaign aimed at academic critics of Canadian writing. He began publishing stories in the 1960s and had two stories in Modern Canadian Stories from Ryerson in 1966 – with Munro’s “The Time of Death” – and five in New Canadian Writing, 1969. His own first collection, The Lady Who Sold Furniture, was published by Clarke, Irwin in 1970. Concurrently, he was assembling two anthologies of Canadian stories for Ryerson aimed at course adoption, Sixteen by Twelve (1970), for high school students, and The Narrative Voice (1972), for students in university. Given Metcalf’s enthusiasm for her work, it is not surprising that he included two Munro stories in each anthology. And given his approach, she also had her first commissioned critical statements in those books, an “Author’s Commentary” in the first and, in the second, one titled (by Metcalf as an acknowledged echo of the well-known essay by Mary McCarthy) “The Colonel’s Hash Resettled.”
Without detailing them, these pieces reveal Munro talking about her writing in her characteristic ways. She is sceptical of writing about writing, preferring that the story itself, rather than any commentary on it, be the real focus. In the first piece, she briefly addresses “An Ounce of Cure,” a story in which a first-person narrator recalls an event when she was in high school. Spurned by a boy she liked, she decided to drown her sorrow by drinking one evening while babysitting. The story, an incident that happened to Daphne Cue as a girl, is mostly comical. Even so, in her essay Munro notes that its narrator “gets out of” what had happened to her “by changing from a participant to an observer” – this is what, as a writer, Munro does herself. Looking back at the story as she wrote her essay, Munro maintained that it accomplished what she sought for it. On the other hand, “Boys and Girls,” a story she wrote “too purposely perhaps,” uses her own history to analyze sex roles. She still wonders over it, and in doing so reveals herself an exacting artist: “When I read this story over I have a feeling of failure and despair; I feel that there’s so much more that should be there, a whole world really, and I have strained it out into this little story and cannot tell if I got what matters.” In “The Colonel’s Hash Resettled,” Munro first displays her fundamental scepticism over the ways of literary critics by undercutting someone’s assertion that the house in “Images” is symbolic, rather than just a description of a house Munro remembered from Lower Town; that is, nothing symbolic, a real house. Her doubts in this regard have never wavered, yet the best part of this essay is Munro’s statement that as a writer she “feels like a juggler trying to describe exactly how he catches the balls … he still feels it may be luck, a good deal of the time, and luck is an unhappy thing to
talk about, it is not reliable.”33
However uncertain she may have been, Munro was writing stories that continued to attract attention and more unsought contacts with other writers. One day during the summer of 1969, Audrey Thomas, who in 1967 had published her own first collection of stories, Ten Green Bottles, went to Munro’s Bookstore specifically to meet the author of Dance of the Happy Shades. George Woodcock had asked her to review it for Canadian Literature and, having done so, Thomas wanted to tell Munro personally how much she liked the book. Munro was not there, but Jim had Thomas call her up at home from the store. Alice invited her to come right over, and the two began a friendship that continues. Today Munro calls Thomas her best friend.
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