Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

1963 and had worked on
Tamarack
, where he first became aware of Munro’s writing. He recalls receiving Munro’s manuscript from Weaver and reading it with the sense “that here is writing of quality and character.” As a result he urged the press’s editor-in-chief, John Webster Grant, “to write to the author to offer to publish 1,000 copies of the work.” Grant did this, but some time before the fall of 1962 Colombo followed up that letter by writing to Munro himself, saying, “We are eager to publish a collection of – say – ten stories, if you feel the time is ripe.” He then names the six stories he has in mind – the full group – and notes also a recent “strong story in the Montrealer [that] would make a suitable introduction to the other stories”; that story was “The Office.” Colombo also asks if there is unpublished material. As with her apparent reaction to McClelland, here too Munro did not press – in fact, Colombo recalls her “resisting Ryerson’s offer to add ‘Dance’ to its next list” during 1962–63.
    Yet Ryerson, owned by the United Church of Canada, was the publisher that eventually brought out
Dance of the Happy Shades
. Begun in 1829 as the Methodist Book and Publishing House, Ryerson had earned distinction for its publication of Canadian writing during the first decades of the century under, successively, E.S. Caswell and Lorne Pierce, who directed Ryerson from 1922 to 1960. John Webster Grant followed him and headed the firm for just three years, 1960 to 1963. He told Colombo after he hired him that he wanted to publish books good enough to receive Governor General’s awards. That is, he wanted to publish books that would have both critical and commercial success. Munro was approached in just that spirit. But when Weaver delivered her manuscript of stories to the Ryerson Press, it ended up sitting in its vault for over five years. From time to time stories from the
Montrealer
– “The Office” then “Boys and Girls” (December 1964) and “Red Dress – 1946” (May 1965) – were added to the manuscript. 11
    This long delay is largely explained by working assumptions at the time, personnel changes at the press, and Munro’s own hesitation. Many at Ryerson shared the general prejudice against collections of stories yet, as Colombo remembers and his own late-1962 letter to Munro indicates, the house was keen on the idea of a small book of stories from Munro. But by 1963 Colombo had left Ryerson to work on his own as an “editor-at-large,” and Grant also left that year to take up a university post; there would not be a new editor-in-chief until Robin Farr joined Ryerson in early 1968. This left Earle Toppings responsible for trade and general books – that is, books that were neither educational nor religious. A graduate of the University of British Columbia and a native of Saskatchewan, Toppings was hired by John Webster Grant as a Ryerson editor in 1961. He recalls meeting Munro between 1962 and 1963 for lunch at the Georgia Hotel in Vancouver. She was “completely unprepossessing.” More than that, during their lunch she was “obviously concerned about her children in a rather fidgety way” since “she got up from lunch at least three times to go and phone the sitter to make sure the children were all right.” Beyond Munro’s personal situation, Toppings “could tell that a book really was not a priority for her at that moment … but she still, I think, felt she was really an underground writer. Some of the stories were getting out and that was all right, but she was not at all promotional about it.” Given her hesitant attitude and the industry prejudice against collections, given Munro’s ongoing attempts at novels, and given the changes at Ryerson occasioned by Grant’s departure in 1963, that no one pressed for a book until 1967 is probably not surprising. Yet Toppings remained in contact with Munro during the interim, and so the idea and Ryerson’s commitment to the project remained real. 12
“How Insistently I Am Warmed and Bound”:
Family, “The Office,” and Leaving Vancouver
    If during the early 1960s Munro was hesitant to press for book publication, she seems throughout these years rather to have been consumedby the tasks at hand: her family’s needs, her own life, and the various stories that held her attention. Looking back at this time, Munro marvels still at how hesitant she was to make her own case then and, by