Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

member drunkenly threatened Bob Laidlaw because of the story, walking around his house, firing a shotgun into the air. No one was hurt. Known and liked by everyone there, Munro’s father downplayed such acts; he knew the people in Lower Wingham, and so knew just who to worry about. But his daughter took them quite seriously and was wary of Wingham for some years after.
    As such incidents illustrate, Munro’s work was beginning to be noticed as the 1950s ended and the 1960s began. In early 1958, Weaver wrote to Munro asking her which story she preferred for his anthology and so “The Time of Death” became an early representation of Munro’s work to a larger audience. In the mid-1960s the Ryerson Press put together another anthology,
Modern Canadian Stories
, and despite the press editor’s preference for new stories, the volume editor selected “The Time of Death” as the Munro inclusion. In his introduction he wrote about Munro that “although she has written only short stories, she is highly respected by a good many critics” and that “ ‘The Time of Death’ is one of her best short stories.”
    There were others. “Sunday Afternoon,” one of the stories derived from Munro’s time as a maid during high school, was included in a revised edition of Desmond Pacey’s
A Book of Canadian Stories
published in 1962. The year before, Weaver included Munro’s “The Trip to the Coast” in
Ten for Wednesday Night
, a collection of stories firstbroadcast on the CBC program
Wednesday Night
. For this, “a small group of writers … were asked to submit new work for a series of radio readings” and first publication, Weaver wrote. 3
    As this suggests, by the early 1960s Weaver was no longer the lone literary person in Canada who saw Munro as a significant younger writer. Yet owing to her location, inclination, and situation, Munro was no more forthcoming in pressing her case than she had ever been. The word about her was out among people who paid attention to such things – Weaver had certainly succeeded that far – but her stories continued to appear as they had throughout the 1950s, here and there, one at a time. Owing to Weaver’s efforts, in late 1961 there was a flurry of activity around the possibility of a collection of Munro’s stories. Three publishers considered it, and the
Tamarack Review
did too, but no book emerged. The Ryerson Press, which was among the three publishers considering the idea in 1961 and the one to which Weaver had taken six of Munro’s stories after the others had declined them, stuck with Munro. It encouraged her during the interim and eventually published
Dance of the Happy Shades
in the fall of 1968. Although sales were such that the first printing provided sufficient stock to hold the publisher well into the 1970s, Munro was launched.
Dance of the Happy Shades
won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in English. Robert Weaver, it should be noted, chaired the selection committee. In 1971 a putative novel,
Lives of Girls and Women
, followed that first book. It extended and confirmed Munro’s growing reputation as one of Canada’s leading writers, and it did so just as the nationalist fervour that characterized the late 1960s and early 1970s in Canada took firm hold.
“Sad, Sensitive, and Preoccupied with Detail”:
The
Montrealer
, a Possible First Book
    In 1961, when “The Trip to the Coast” appeared in
Ten for Wednesday Night
, the biographical entry preceding the story ends “Mrs. Munro is now at work on a first novel.” That year, too, in the first newspaper profile focused on her, the author wrote that since “her first successMrs. Munro has been selling stories to a variety of Canadian publications including ‘Chatelaine’ and ‘Canadian Forum’. Her reputation as a writer of great talent and promise has grown with each story published. Possibly the most surprised, and certainly the most modest, about this success, is Mrs. Munro herself.” Munro’s modesty, during this time and throughout her career, was not based on any uncertainty about her identity as a writer – a writer was what she was, and what she was continuing to be. As she wrote to Weaver when she told him she had not approached George Woodcock for a reference letter to the Canada Council, “I don’t feel so worthless and undeserving as all that.” Her modesty has had more to do with her own shyness and, more pointedly, with her own high expectations for her work.
    During the