Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Chatelaine,” it is fair to surmise that editors at the magazine thought they had found a new talent appropriate to their readers’ tastes. But as Weaver’s faint praise of “Day of the Butterfly” implies, magazines like
Chatelaine
were looking for a certain sort of story – those centred on women’s experiences – and the three stories of Munro’s they published conformed to type: “How Could I Do That?” focuses on a teenaged daughter’s cruel snub to her mother in front of her girlfriends; “The Day of the Butterfly” (published in the magazine as “Good-By, Myra”), on the narrator’s memory of Myra Sayla, an outsider from her group of schoolgirl friends, who falls ill and dies; “The Dangerous One,” about a cousin who comes to live with a protagonist’s grandmother and who proves to be dangerous because she is both a liar and a thief.
    That Weaver rejected such stories – and that
Chatelaine
bought them – is significant. Weaver and his colleagues at the CBC were pushing Munro away from conventional stories and toward her own material. In May of 1957, Weaver wrote Munro, rejecting a story called “The Cousins.” After taking detailed issue with Munro’s treatment of her material, Weaver summarized their reaction to the piece by describing it bluntly as “a fairly disastrous failure.” After such a categorical rejection, Weaver asks for a letter telling him what she is doing. “Have you begun work on a novel yet?” He says, “I may have given your name to Robert Fulford, Managing Editor of
Mayfair Magazine”
because that magazine “is once again buying short stories from time to time andmight be worth trying.” As it happened, Gladys Shenner, the
Chatelaine
editor who had bought Munro’s stories, had left the magazine, so it is not altogether clear that Munro would have continued selling stories to them in any case. But here – and over the next three or four years especially, as Munro submitted and then sold stories to the
Montrealer
at Weaver’s suggestion, and as the idea of a collection of stories became more possible – Weaver was consistently both critical and encouraging. 39
    A key instance of Weaver’s ability to both support Munro and push her involves “Thanks for the Ride,” a story she no longer admires but one that, when she wrote it in 1955, represented just the ambition Weaver was speaking about when he rejected “The Cousins.” The story focuses on an adolescent pickup affair. Responding to the readings it received at the CBC , Munro kept revising and working on it. 40 Along with several other editors, Weaver was just then founding a new literary quarterly, the
Tamarack Review
(1956–1982), an important presence during this early and crucial time in Canadian literary history. Weaver was one of two editors of the quarterly; the other was William Toye, who worked at Oxford University Press in Toronto. Weaver ran
Tamarack
concurrent with his work at the CBC ; at some point “Thanks for the Ride” left the CBC and went there. Munro recalls having to redo it once it was rejected by the
Tamarack Review
, since Jim, having read it, made some critical comments when it came back. She responded, in a rage, by taking the manuscript to the trash and throwing it out. Then Weaver wrote and asked to see it again, so she redid it yet again and “Thanks for the Ride” – the same version that was included in
Dance of the Happy Shades
– was the lead story in
Tamarack
’s second issue.
    Throughout, Weaver was doubtless well aware that, given its risqué subject matter, he could not broadcast the story, but publishing it in a literary review was another matter. For him, that was not the point: he was prodding Munro to make this ambitious story a more accomplished one. Whether he knew it or not, Weaver was also pushing Munro to go deeper into her personal material: although Lois in “Thanks for the Ride” is not an explicitly autobiographical character, Munro doubtless knew girls like her who lived in Lower Town, girls who dropped out of school early and found work in the Winghamglove works, girls who were often viewed by boys as sexual objects rather than as persons. Dick, the narrator, is a middle-class boy who has his father’s car for a weekend visit to his mother at a religious health camp; his background is thus somewhat analogous to Jim Munro’s. By encouraging Munro to go deeper into these characters, Weaver was pressing her to sharpen her sense of the