Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

program of readings of original stories. When he arrived it had been on the air since 1946 and was undistinguished, so Weaver set about soliciting stories from across the country. He also drew on his own contacts at the University of Toronto (Henry Kreisel and James Reaney were classmates, so their work came in) and elsewhere. Having produced
Canadian Short Stories
himself, James Scott was a source, too, since he was involved with young writers at Western – he put Doug Spettigue in touch with Weaver and may well have done the same with Munro. She recalls hearing that a classmate, Bill Davidson, had sent a story to Weaver. Doug Spettigue did so as well, since one of his was broadcast in July 1951. By May of that year Alice had begun a correspondence with Weaver over her own submissions.
    Connecting with Robert Weaver was a key moment for Alice Munro, even a very lucky one. Luck and timing did have roles to play in her career’s unfolding, and hearing about
Canadian Short Stories
was one such moment. Weaver’s “main concern” was “to promote literature through the medium of radio” and, as he wrote in the June 1949 CBC program guide, “one of the chief aims” of
Canadian Short Stories
was to “discover and develop new talent.” At the same time, Weaver was acting on his own initiative: his was a classic case of a person defining and extending his own position. He went well beyond what was expected of him by his superiors and so made a contribution to Canadian letters that extended the scope of what the corporation did in fostering Canadian writing. After almost a decade of this, he extended his radio work with his editorial direction of the
Tamarack Review
. Setting about all this in 1948, Bob Weaver – as everyone still calls him – became what Robert Fulford has called “a one-man national literary network.” Somehow, Fulford has said, Weaver “caught on at the CBC and stayed there for the rest of his career”; he “seized upon this position at the CBC to become the friend, advocate, the explorer, the discoverer of Canadian writers.” Weaver made a point of travelling across the country, making regular trips to the west coast and to Montreal and points east. When he stopped, he would have parties in his hotel rooms, inviting all the local writers and others with literary connections. Through such gatherings, writers, editors, and critics met and came to know one another so Weaver was able to function as “a one-man national literary network” indeed.
    In the conclusion to his 1984 thesis on Weaver’s contributions to Canadian literature, Mark Everard anticipates this book by writing that the “biographer of Alice Munro … would be both ungracious and historically inaccurate if he did not examine in some detail the editorial relationship that was largely responsible for keeping Munro interested in writing” in the years before her first book,
Dance of the Happy Shades
, was published. 15 That relationship began apparently when the Canadian Writers’ Service – an agency run by Cybil Hutchinson, who had been an editor at McClelland & Stewart – submitted “The Man Who Goes Home” to Weaver early in 1951. That was the same Munro story JimJackson had read at the literary evening in London, and Weaver rejected it, but on May 18 he wrote to her at 1081 Richmond Street about two other stories, “The Widower” and “The Strangers.” He rejected “The Widower” but, contingent on Munro’s willingness to shorten “The Strangers” –
Canadian Short Stories
required pieces not longer than 2,100 words – offered to buy it. He hoped to broadcast it on June 1, so the cuts had to be done quickly. Weaver suggests how to do this, but his most indicative comments are his criticisms of “The Widower”: “Here you have failed to rise above somewhat commonplace and tedious material.” The three stories he has seen suggest to him that Munro tends to understate her material. “This is something which a great many of our writers could learn to their benefit, but when this method is followed in a story like ‘The Widower,’ which is rather unexciting in the first place, it can sometimes have an unfortunate effect.” He continues, saying that “you are trying hard to use words with care and to present your material with real integrity and I certainly hope that you will continue writing, and that we will be given the opportunity to read some later stories of yours.” Munro replies in a week,