Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

pausing over as they relate to Munro’s career as she moves toward
Dance of the Happy Shades
. Pronounced in her first newspaper profile “the least praised good writer in Canada” by one of the country’s leading cultural journalists, championed by Robert Weaver of the CBC and the
Tamarack Review
(who was then broadcasting three more of her stories and seeking more for
Tamarack)
, Munro in late 1961
was
verging on a book. It was her logical next step. But though her stories were very well regarded, a novel and nothing but a novel was what was wanted by the public and by the publishing business. And from the late 1950s on through the 1960s, a novel was what Munro tried to produce, though she never could do so to her own satisfaction. While she had made various attempts at novels throughout this period, it is noteworthy that “The Death of a White Fox” – in its various guises, a long short story, really – is the only surviving narrative of any length in the papers at Calgary beyond preliminary material for
Lives of Girls and Women
. Some of the material from other attempted novels later emerged as stories – “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You,” or “The Found Boat,” in her second collection – but much of this work was presumably abandoned or destroyed.
    Just after Munro spoke to Kane in mid-November 1961, Weaver wrote her saying that “Ryerson Press wants to see the five short stories since they are trying to find some work by younger writers and obviously intend generally to improve their publishing program. I am going to assume that you won’t mind and send the five stories to a friend of mine at Ryerson Press.” In the same letter, Weaver also suggested that “if you get a story done which you feel is one of your better ones, why don’t you make a concerted attempt to publish it in one of the betterU.S. magazines?” Munro had been doing this for several years, though without any success. Weaver offers to provide her with a list of magazines and adds both sympathetically and perceptively: “I don’t know quite what to say to you at the moment about the novel problem, but if you don’t feel anxious or even capable of writing a good novel right now and do feel ready to keep on with the short stories, I’d spend the winter on shorter fiction.” Here is yet another example of Weaver’s thoroughness in his support and advice to Munro – he is pressing on with the book possibility, and acting on it; he wants her to try new magazines for the exposure they might provide; and he is well aware of Munro’s aesthetic predicament, balanced between her innate inclination to write short fiction while the market, and a part of herself, wants a novel. And in the earlier letter in which he advises Munro on how to respond to David Watmough, Weaver concludes by saying that “I’ll see about an agent in October when I’m in New York.”
    What this last comment suggests is that during the fall of 1961 Munro and Weaver were investigating a variety of ways to advance Munro’s career. This was a time when few Canadian writers had agents and, even in the United States, those who did had them just for book publication. Most short story writers still dealt directly with magazine editors, an arrangement that persisted into the 1970s. Yet here Munro is, implicitly at least, investigating that possibility through Weaver, one that continued to arise from time to time until she hired Virginia Barber as her agent in 1976. Here too Weaver is counselling her to nurture her talent for short fiction, sensing that Munro might not really want to write the novel everyone seemed to expect and, in any case, might not even be capable of it. As she has said of her writing generally, but of this period of her career in particular, and her various attempts at a novel, writing is “just constant despair.”
    Looking back on the whole of her career, Munro has also said that “at a certain point I need somebody” to respond to her writing. From the early 1950s through the 1960s, Weaver was most certainly that person, and Munro needed and valued his direct personal critique and support throughout these years. But as the 1960s passed, it is clear that Weaver’s support involved his reaching outside his own sphere ofcontrol into book publishing as Munro’s career developed with his careful and persistent help.

    Weaver’s friend at the Ryerson Press was John Robert Colombo. Colombo was an editor there from 1960 to