Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

the 1970s, in the 1980s she did the same for Guy Vanderhaeghe and Jane Urquhart. Occasionally she tried to help an aspiring writer directly, as when she submitted a collection of poems directly to a publisher on the writer’s behalf.
    Prizes of various sorts also came Munro’s way. In 1983 Munro was being considered for the Order of Canada (and Gibson provided background materials on her behalf), the next year Queen’s University offered an honorary doctorate; in each case Munro declined. She won another Gold Award from the National Magazine Foundation for “Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd,” but a special highlight was the Academy Award won by the Atlantis Films production of her story “Boys and Girls,” as best short-live-action film. It was an early success for Atlantis, a small company made up of three recent Queen’s graduates. This award was suggestive of a growing interest in the cinematic possibilitiesof Munro’s work. The CBC had done “Postcard,” “How I Met My Husband,” and “Baptizing” previously, but during the 1980s inquiries came in for films based on
Lives of Girls and Women
, “An Ounce of Cure,” “Simon’s Luck,” “Tell Me Yes or No,” and “Thanks for the Ride.” Films of
Lives
and “Thanks” were eventually made.
    Munro and Fremlin returned to Australia for a holiday between June and October 1983, but for the most part Munro remained in Clinton, dodging as many of these chores as possible in order to guard her time to write. Between her
New Yorker
bonanzas, 1982 through early 1984 were largely given over to writing. No stories were considered by the magazine between December 1981 and July 1984, but they looked at seven (plus the first revision of “Fits”) between July and the end of the year. These were the stories that so impressed McGrath and became the core of
The Progress of Love
, her next book.
    One chore Munro did not dodge but rather volunteered for and embraced was the writing of the foreword for a book edited by Robert Weaver and co-published by the CBC and Macmillan.
The Anthology Anthology
was published to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the radio program. Anne Holloway and Gibson at Macmillan knew that Weaver would do nothing to showcase his own work. So Munro was asked to do it and she readily accepted – her own “The Shining Houses,” read on the CBC in 1962, was the lead story in the collection. An early draft of the foreword begins its closing paragraph with these words: “My personal debt to Robert Weaver is simply beyond measure.” In the published version, Munro describes the bases for this recognition from her first contact with Weaver in 1951 through their first meeting in 1953 and their many contacts since, but she does not detail her own perpetual acknowledgement of Weaver throughout her career.
    This is the other side of the view of Munro as recluse. She seems to have mentioned him in every interview she ever gave, certainly in any that touched on her first publication. While Munro has become famous (or infamous) for avoiding the limelight herself (you have to be “selfish, self-protective” to be a writer, she told Patrick Watson in 1976), she has never hesitated from doing chores involving people who matter to her and to whom she is grateful. Foremost among these people is RobertWeaver. Munro wrote the book’s foreword, was interviewed along with Morley Callaghan by Weaver for the anniversary
Anthology
program and on C BC-TV’S
The Journal
, and participated in the tribute to Weaver at Harbourfront. All of this followed her dedication of
Moons
to him. Self-protecting when it came to her writing, Munro has not stinted those to whom she feels grateful. At just about the same time, when the
Malahat Review
was putting together a tribute volume for John Metcalf, Munro wrote something for him as well. 19
“I want some kind of purity”:
The Progress of Love
and Its Progress from Macmillan to McClelland & Stewart
    When the
New Yorker
editors received three new Munro stories to consider in July 1984, it had been well over two years since they had seen “Bardon Bus.” The new stories were “Gold,” “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux,” and “The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink.” As they tended to do (despite Barber’s best efforts), McGrath and his colleagues set one Munro story against another, buying “Skating Rink” and rejecting the others. “Gold,” a story that recreates the scene of people giving impromptu