Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

identifying herself as the story’s author. Taaffe immediately bought it and published it in his February 1961 issue. Munro herself had not seen his letter. The Vancouver poet Elizabeth Gourlay saw it and, having heard the story broadcast on
Anthology
in October 1960, remembered it as one of Munro’s. She contacted Munro, whom she did not know, and the two developed a friendship. When she sold “Dance” to the
Montrealer
, Munro took Gourlay to lunch. 6
    “Dance of the Happy Shades” proved to be the first of five Munro stories and one memoir (“Remember Roger Mortimer,” February 1962) that Taaffe published in the
Montrealer
between 1961 and 1965. As such, only the
New Yorker
has exceeded this count; the
Tamarack Review
also saw six pieces by Munro, but it did so over a much longer period. “Dance” was followed in the
Montrealer
by “An Ounce of Cure” (May 1961), “The Office” (September 1962), “Boys and Girls” (December 1964), and “Red Dress – 1946” (May 1965). Except for the first, all are rooted in Munro’s personal experience – what she calls in the Struthers interview “the real material.” These five stories, along with the three that Munro wrote during 1967–68 to complete her book manuscript – “Images,” “Postcard,” and “Walker Brothers Cowboy” – are among the strongest stories in that book.
    Once he found Munro, Taaffe was clearly taken by her work. After already publishing two stories in 1961, he wrote Munro in August. Noting that it “is a long time between your stories” he admitted that he wanted to encourage her, saying “I enjoyed the last two” stories and he is hoping to stimulate her to submit “more work to
The Montrealer
.” He also suggested that she might try “to write a good personal travel essay” but if “this doesn’t work, perhaps you are experimenting with a new approach to fiction.… At any rate,” he promised, “you can be sure ofan appreciative reception of anything you send.” Evidently, Munro responded quickly, since less than two months later Taaffe writes her apologizing for his “delay in reporting about your ‘Remember Roger Mortimer’, which I can use in February, and for which I can pay $75.… It was a very good personal essay, and I was particularly pleased to see that you have kept the same basic style as that you use in your fiction.” In June 1962, Taaffe wrote to Munro about “The Office,” telling her of its publication date and adding that he “liked the rewrite quite as much as I did the original version, which is a good deal.” 7 He had in fact received a revision he had not asked for, one Munro decided to do on her own. This pattern was often repeated in later years when she was publishing in the
New Yorker
. Although her editor might be satisfied, Munro was not.
    Also during 1962, Taaffe did a freelance book review for the CBC program
Critically Speaking
, another of the group of programs produced by Weaver. The book under review was
The First Five Years: A Selection From “The Tamarack Review”
edited by Weaver and introduced by Robert Fulford. It was published by Oxford University Press. Taaffe asserts that
    somehow Alice Munro strikes me as the most typical of the
Tamarack
writers, although she would probably be the last to claim first place among them. Her story in this collection is “The Peace of Utrecht”, and a single sentence, chosen more or less at random, should help situate it. I quote: “On the hall table was a bouquet of pink phlox, whose scent filled the hot dead air of a closed house on a summer afternoon”. Miss Munro’s sentence, like her story, is sad, sensitive, preoccupied with detail, as bleak as a ramshackle prairie town – it is written with painstaking perfection. 8
    Taaffe’s enthusiasm for Munro’s writing is another key to her growing reputation as the 1960s began. Equally, Munro’s submission of an unsigned “Dance of the Happy Shades” is telling. Although Weaver remained her main literary contact, she was becoming known through the impressive qualities found in her prose rather than through personalconnections or self-promotion. Taaffe was delighted to buy whatever writing he could get from Munro. He recalls her later stories commanded his top rate ($150 to $200), a sizable portion of his monthly editorial budget and a fee he also paid to such better-known writers as Norman Levine and Mordecai Richler. Thus the five Munro stories and personal essay that