Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

late 1950s and into the 1960s, the pressure to write a novel and the difficulties it occasioned vexed Munro; when she writes to Weaver in 1959 of “feeling so fertile after the long drought,” or of “a period of considerable depression and uselessness this fall,” Munro’s drought and her depression were brought on by her dissatisfactions with her attempts at the novel form. A novel, long sought, continued as a major challenge during the 1960s. When one was finally published in 1971 as
Lives of Girls and Women
, that book certainly fulfilled the expectation, if not exactly the form. Throughout these years, as the author of that first profile maintained, Munro’s “output has been very small because of the demands of home and family.” 4
    While home and family certainly demanded much of her time – Munro’s life at the time was that of any mother to young children, one of interruptions and other demands – it is equally clear that she was struggling with fictional form: “I was trying to find a meaning,” she told Jill Gardiner in 1973. What this meant, practically, was that as a writer of fiction Munro was trying to write the novel that others were encouraging her to do. At the same time, as “The Peace of Utrecht” confirmed, Munro was beginning to discover material that was working at a deeper, more personal, level in her stories than she had previously. Thus as she tried to find her way into a novel that worked, Munro was also writing the stories that would prove to be the core of
Dance of the Happy Shades
.
    The year 1959 is indicative of Munro’s changing focus. When she was working on “The Peace of Utrecht” during that summer she was also at work on “A Trip to the Coast” and “Dance of the Happy Shades” – “feeling so fertile after [the] long drought,” she told Weaver. Two of these stories – “Peace” and “Dance” – felt to Munro “like the first real stories” she had ever written. (“A Trip to the Coast,” ironically given its connection with these two, is a story she now says she really does not like.) “Dance of the Happy Shades,” in contrast to “Peace,” does not much draw on personal material. It owes something to a music teacher named Miss McBain who taught Jim’s aunt Ethel; it derives its setting from Munro’s summer as a maid in Toronto and her visits to Oakville, and it gets its characters from there and from Munro’s time in suburban Vancouver. 5
    But while “Dance of the Happy Shades” is a significant story because of Munro’s view of it, and it is obviously prominent as the title story of her first book, the circumstances of its initial publication as her first contribution to the
Montrealer
bear comment.
    The
Montrealer
(1924–1970) was a monthly magazine focused on the English-speaking society in the city that, certainly into the 1960s, was the cultural and business centre of Canada. English was its language. The
Montrealer
styled itself “the magazine for discriminating Canadians” and throughout its history it was characterized by good writing, though it was not especially literary until the late 1950s, when the editor, David Hackett, began publishing serious fiction. Hackett, an American, left the magazine to work on John Kennedy’s presidential campaign and in May 1960 he was replaced by Gerald Taaffe. He also was an American who had emigrated to Canada in 1951 and had worked as a journalist in Quebec City; he wrote fiction as well. He found himself both editor and staff (though there was some help with layout and circulation) and with a budget of a thousand dollars per issue for all costs – journalism, fiction, cartoons, everything. During his time on the
Montrealer
– Taaffe was there until December 1965 – he had to do freelance journalism to support himself.
    Taaffe took over the
Montrealer
intent on continuing Hackett’s practice of publishing fiction, and as a writer of fiction himself, hewanted to get the best possible. On his arrival in 1960, he went through the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts (it was over a foot high, he recalls) and found just one piece he wanted to publish – a story called “Dance of the Happy Shades.” It was, unfortunately, unsigned. In order to identify its author Taaffe canvassed his Montreal contacts, to no avail. He also wrote with his inquiry to writing magazines in the United States; they published his letter and, after some months, he heard from an Alice Munro in Vancouver