Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

them Weaver’s second selection of Canadian stories in which Munro has two stories – the magazine and literary quarterlies were uniformly effusive. Writing the “Letters in Canada” essay in the
University of Toronto Quarterly
, Gordon Roper maintained that Munro’s “sensitivity to a wide range of individuals, of feeling, and of situation and place is remarkable, and she conveys her awareness with a sure sense of touch that seems effortless.” Kent Thompson, this time in the
Fiddlehead
, likened Munro’s technique to James Agee’s and noted that “she has a remarkable command of detail and nuance. She has an ability … to set details in tonal relationships to one another and thereby effect a mood out of a ‘simple’ description.”
    Toward the end of his foreword, Garner calls the book’s contents “women’s stories” and, relishing this in
Canadian Literature
, Audrey Thomas takes on this “fatuous conclusion.” She writes that in Munro’sstories “the
tone
of these stories is curiously detached and un-feminine,
un-
emotional and
un
-involved. And the work is never sentimental or sentimentalized.” That, Thomas thinks, may even be a weakness: “One is almost aware, sometimes, of the writer consciously holding herself in, too much afraid that if her voice becomes passionate, even for a moment, she will be accused of writing ‘women’s stories’ and told to get thee to
Chatelaine
, or the
Ladies’ Home Journal.”
Thomas also observes admiringly that “it might be possible to love Mrs. Munro for her sentences alone, they are so carefully considered and so beautifully in balance.” John Peter, a South African who taught at the University of Victoria and was one of the founders of the
Malahat Review
, wrote there that Munro’s prose “is a model of fastidiousness and precision.… Yet it is the human content of the stories that matters most,” he continues, “and in many of them this is so sensitively handled that it beggars the imagination to try to suppose them in any way improved.… This is a book for the English-speaking world, and will hold its own against all comers, from anywhere.” And in
Queen’s Quarterly
, writer David Helwig comments that Munro’s “art consists of an expansion inward, rather than outward, the discrimination of tone and language that makes a small event within a provincial society an important human matter.”
    Two critical notes often struck in these reviews had to do with the book’s appearance and with the usefulness of Garner’s foreword. Peter begins his review noting the “book’s ugly jacket” and its “posturing introduction” and Joan Phillips in the St. Catharines
Standard
similarly begins by saying that “if ever there were a case for not judging a book by its cover” this is it, since “this outstanding collection” of stories is hidden behind “such an unappealing and uninspired, even downright ugly, dust jacket and binding.” In the same vein, another commented that this book’s designer must have previously done geometry textbooks. Beth Harvor, in an overview of Canada’s women writers in
Saturday Night
, sees the foreword as unfortunate: Munro is “damned by extravagant praise” from Garner, who then “seizes the introduction and makes it into a soap-box from which to attack younger writers and other forms and styles they work in.” 28
    In March 1969 Munro heard from Robin Farr at Ryerson that
Dance of the Happy Shades
was among the nominees for a Governor General’s Award. Canada’s leading literary award at the time, it had a mixed reputation. In his review of
Dance
John Peter expressed a commonly held view that, for a book to receive a Governor General’s Award was “an artistic kiss of death.” Munro recalls visiting a bookstore looking for
Dance
after it had won. When she asked for it, no doubt shyly, she was told by the owner that he did not keep those Governor General’s books in his store – they did not sell. Originally an award without monetary prize, $1,000 was added to the honour some years before Munro’s win. By the time of
Dance
’s nomination the prize was $2,500 and a specially bound copy of the book. In 1969, for the first time since the awards began in 1936, the names of all the nominees were announced by the Canada Council a month before the award ceremony. Moreover, when they were presented in May 1969 by the governor general at Rideau Hall, the prime minister of the day, Pierre Elliott