Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

a baby were characterized by her mother’s utter exhaustion. Munro had a new baby to care for, was working at the store, and now had a much larger house to tend to, with no help beyond Sheila’s. She told Ross that during this time “nothing in life mattered to me as much as sleep, not sex, not anything. The marriage never regained anything after that.”
    In March 1967 when she sent Toppings a copy of “The Office,” she commented that it “is an example of the Early-Awful period, and it is a good deal better than most. I went through them and was surprised how bad some were.” A week later she wrote again, having heard in the meantime that Ryerson had decided to publish her collection; she is characteristically self-deprecating:
    Well I haven’t got a telegram yet saying you’ve all changed your minds or you thought it was an April Fool’s or anything like that so I guess you are going to publish those stories and I am of course delighted. Did you really mean fall of ’68? I didn’t know things were planned so far ahead and I thought it might be a mistake for fall ’67. Anyway I’m glad its fall because anything can sell then, even a collection of unsexy short stories.
    At the same time, Munro expresses concern about including “that old Chatelaine story,” “Good-By, Myra,” so she sends Toppings “a couple of other oldies to make a choice from, if you think either of them would do better.” She tells him that her preferred choice for it is “The Day of the Butterfly.” One of the other stories she sent for consideration was “The Shining Houses,” which “was just broadcast on C.B.C.[,] never published, and I’d lost the last page of this manuscript but I found a rough copy and typed it up from that.” Munro also characteristically notes that just “a few things have to be tidied up in the stories you have. For instance, in ‘The Peace of Utrecht’ the punctuation is awful – far too many brackets. I could fix that.” She concludes, moving to her most pressing concern as a writer – the piece she is concentrating on now: “I am hopeful about the novel but get very little time. I think I might be able to do a Great Leap Forward this summer, when my teenage daughter is home to look after the baby, and we have some college girls in the store.… I hope to get a letter from you soon.”
    This period in March 1967 needs to be paused over. Largely through the advocacy of others – Robert Weaver, Earle Toppings, and, in the wings, Audrey Coffin, Munro’s editor for her first three books –Alice Munro’s career as a writer was reaching a moment she had acknowledged as possible but had never much sought out: her first book. Because of its range, its detail, and its precision of emotion,
Dance of the Happy Shades
would launch Munro as a writer at a level she had not previously known; its immediate recognition through the Governor General’s Award was an external sign of her writing’s appeal, and of her presence as a Canadian writer to be noticed and watched closely. Yet owing to her shyness and uncertainty, this accomplishment was something that seemed to happen accidentally to her. Beyond responding to letters, putting stories in the mail, and following up suggestions, Munro did little to advocate her own cause. She concentrated on the work at hand and let things happen. More than that, in Victoria she was far from English-Canada’s literary centre, Toronto. Thus in writing to Toppings in March 1967, she deprecates her past efforts while looking ahead to the work in progress, the novel.
    Personally the spring of 1967 saw the beginnings of Munro’s “long voyage from the house of marriage.” As her 1970s draft fragment makes clear, the house on Rockland that Jim bought against his wife’s will when she was pregnant was one to which she was never reconciled. Throughout their years together, Jim recalls, Alice was never assertive regarding decorating: “She never made a big fuss about decor; … it wasn’t a big deal with her.” Yet that new house – massive, calling out to be made a showcase home – reawakened the class differences between the Munros that had always been there but had remained mostly submerged in the daily lives. Away from Ontario, making their way, raising a family, the Munros did not have time to dwell on such differences until the late 1960s. By then, too, much of the world was in the midst of the public foment that characterized the decade: Vietnam,