Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

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    In the same essay in which she recounts her encounter with Lawrence Russell, Munro asserts that, in Victoria in the mid-1960s, “I had absolutely no status as a writer.” While that was certainly true in Victoria at the time, Munro’s name was becoming increasingly well known to the small coterie of people who watched alertly for emerging Canadian writers. When
Dance of the Happy Shades
appeared, many in this group acknowledged their prior awareness of her. Advertising in the Toronto
Globe and Mail’s
book section, the Ryerson Press ad asserts this prior status, describing Munro as “an author who is just beginningto reap the acclaim she has so long deserved.” Dorothy Bishop in the Ottawa
Journal
wrote in December 1968 that “astute critics have for some time been placing [Munro] among the handful of our best younger writers of the short story,” and Kent Thompson, reviewing the book on CBC radio in May 1969 after it had received the Governor General’s Award, said that before the award “Mrs. Munro’s work was known only to that Canadian literary community which reads the small literary magazines.”
    The public reception accorded
Dance of the Happy Shades
changed that unalterably. On the October 19 broadcast of the CBC ’s
Anthology
, writer Leo Simpson reviewed Munro’s book along with Alden Nowlan’s
Miracle at Indian River
, pronouncing himself to be “totally impressed by … her artistry.” What struck him was “the breadth and depth of humanity in the woman herself, and the beauty – the almost terrifying beauty – she commands in expressing it.” Looking back at this review now, Simpson’s prescience is evident, for after noting Munro “came upon [him] unawares,” leaving him “all the more astonished and delighted,” he asserts that “she is already a writer of what I suppose can be called … an international interest. Her work is in basic humanity, and it makes seas and nationalities subordinate to her vision. She is of larger-than-Canadian interest too, in the nature of her talent itself, I believe. Her talent is immense, and disciplined.” Simpson then goes on to declare Munro better than Irish writer Edna O’Brien without taking the comparison very far. In later years Munro’s work shared the pages of the
New Yorker
with O’Brien’s. 26
    Prescient and perceptive, Simpson’s early review encapsulates the various newspaper reviews
Dance
received during the fall of 1968 and into 1969. Sheila Fischman, en route to a distinguished career as a translator of French literature, wrote in the
Globe and Mail
that “Munro’s sensibility … makes common experiences become unique but universal expressions of something of what it means to be alive – children’s parties, high school dances, traveling salesmen and the banal agonies of young love.” Fischman sees Munro’s use of her native Huron County as comparable to the invocation of the American South by such writers as Carson McCullers while, in the Regina
Leader-Post
, an anonymousreviewer sees parallels to James Reaney’s writing. As these comments suggest, many reviewers paid special attention to Munro’s evocation of her home. One of the Victoria reviewers addressed the importance of setting to Munro, “since very little happens in her stories,” while the other is reminded of W. Somerset Maugham by Munro’s “economy of style, observation, polish, and perception”; like him too, Munro “is a completely honest writer, neither adding nor subtracting for effect.” But unlike Maugham’s work, there is no cynicism in Munro’s stories. Helen Tench in the
Ottawa Citizen
echoed one of Garner’s phrasings (“ordinary people in ordinary situations, living ordinary lives”) when she exclaims, “And what a collection it is – sparingly but superbly written, about ordinary things that happen to ordinary people.” Jamie Portman, in the
Calgary Herald
, commented that “the Ryerson Press does not publish very much fiction these days, but what it does issue merits attention and respect.”
Dance
, he noted, is “a sometimes brilliant and always impressive collection.” 27
    The only Canadian review even remotely hesitant, let alone negative, was by Hilda Kirkwood in the
Canadian Forum
. She takes up Garner’s assertion that Munro is one of “the real ones”; demurring, she details her preferred individual stories, leaving others alone. Apart from this review – which also considered two anthologies, one of