Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

the times, becoming less staid, less a colonial outpost, more a place where things happened.
    This sense, along with a growing awareness of Canada’s economic and military dependency on the United States, brought nationalism to the fore in English Canada to an extent not previously seen. With most of Canada’s export trade going to the United States, and often through Canadian branch plants owned by U.S.-based multinationals, English-Canadian nationalists became deeply exercised. “So long as this country remains a small political satellite of the United States,” the poet Earle Birney said when discussing Canadian publishing, “involved in the American economy of waste and war, our cultural future will be negligible.” When Birney spoke, the Americans were just becoming mired in what would turn out to be a hopeless war in Vietnam that brought thousands of draft dodgers to Canada, many eager to pronounce its superiority as a more humane society. Coupled with this, some thought that Canadian universities had been taken over by American Ph.D.s and that Canadian culture was being strangled in those institutions as well.
    These facts had the effect of enhancing the growing force of nationalism as the 1970s began and that, in turn, brought a new-found awareness of the importance of Canadian writing and culture to the life of the nation. “Read Canadian” was a frequent assertion that encouraged the rise during the 1960s and 1970s of an English-Canadian audience for literary works by Canadians that had been minor before. A major report on Canadian studies at the time was entitled
To Know Ourselves
. For Munro and for other writers as she came to know them then, this was a time of organization, of professionalization, and of expansion of interest in Canadian writing. It was a time for developing and nurturing a Canadian audience. 35
    In December 1970, just as she completed the manuscript of
Lives of Girls and Women
, Munro found herself caught up in one of the great nationalist
causes célèbres
of the era. On November 2 the United Church of Canada had announced that the Ryerson Press had been sold toMcGraw-Hill, an American firm “in the latest U.S. takeover to occur in this country,” as a
Toronto Daily Star
columnist wrote. He also quoted Ryerson’s manager, Gavin Clark, saying, “It’s just another in a long line of Canadian sellouts.” For 140 years a Canadian company, long associated with the publication of Canadian writing through its trade books, Ryerson was most attractive to McGraw-Hill for its $3-million-a-year textbook business. The reporter from the
Star
continued, “Jack McClelland called the ‘decision to sell’ to an American-controlled company ‘absolutely appalling. The church should be severely criticized.’ And that was the general consensus. The United Church was deluged with letters from across the country that lamented the sale to a foreign corporation.” One person wrote that “if you sell Ryerson to foreigners my family and I will never set foot in the United Church again.” “Amid more publicity than has ever before been attached to events in book publishing in this country,”
Quill & Quire
, the book industry magazine, summarized just after the sale was concluded, “the deal was announced, discussed, quarreled with, and finally completed. As an outcome, the government of Ontario … appointed a royal commission” to look into book publishing in Canada. 36
    Munro became involved and closely watched the Ryerson sale because her contract for
Dance of the Happy Shades
contained the standard clause requiring her to submit her next manuscript to Ryerson. A few weeks after the sale was announced, she wrote to Earle Toppings seeking advice. She could not understand why Ryerson had not contacted the writers it had under contract. She asked him if the sale was going to happen and wondered if, should it occur, the next-book clause would be enforced. Munro also wondered if Toppings thought “McGraw-Hill is going to be interested in publishing Canadian fiction.… The reason for this,” she continues, “is that I have another book finished which I was, naturally, going to send to Ryerson. Now I don’t know what to do.”
    In mid-December, after the Ryerson sale had been finalized, Munro wrote again, thanking Toppings for “replying so fully to my bewildered bleatings.” She explains that when she had not heard from him immediately, she had independently concluded what he later