ALICE MUNRO: Some Personal Reflections on Her Oeuvre

ALICE MUNRO
She and I are into different stuff….

Part 1:

A Canadian, Alice Munro now 82, won the Nobel Prize for Literature last week, on 10 October 2013, as the autumn season was adding its richest colours to many places in Canada.(1) Like the Australian Patrick White, who has been the only Australian ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, Munro is the only Canadian to ever have won that coveted award. Saul Bellow, the 1976 prize winner, lived in Quebec until he was nearly 10 but, then, he and his family moved to Chicago; he has always been typically seen as an American writer with much of his work set in that third most populous city in the USA.

White’s novels are epic. They possess a psychological narrative art which introduced into world literature both the Australian continent and the complex human psyche found Downunder. The clinical psychologist Ronald Conway unwrapped that psyche in his several book-length analyses of the Australian character. It is getting more difficult to generalize and define that character in the increasingly multi-cultural society that is found in the antipodes. But that does not prevent students and scholars from trying.

I found Conway's works useful when teaching psychology to post-secondary school students in several Australian states from the 1970s to the 2000s. I also remember teaching one of White’s novels back in the early 1990s when I was a lecturer in English literature in western Australia.

Munro, though, is not a novelist. She’s into short stories, and has been since her teens back in the 1940s. These were the years just after I was born, and not far from Huron country in Ontario where Munro started her life. It also looks like she will end her years there in western Ontario sometime in the next few years--whether she continues writing or not.

Part 2:

Munro has been frequently omitted from conventional lists of the greatest writers of her age. This is due, perhaps, to her chosen form, the short story, as well as the apparent narrowness of her literary palette. Most of her works explore the warp and weft of small-town life in western Ontario. Fans praise her ability to express, in brutally honed sentences, not just the nature of small human hardships and dilemmas, but the very feeling of living within them. The world hardly needs to be introduced to small town life, though, in Ontario or anywhere else.

Colm Toíbin(1955-), the Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic and poet, described one of Munro’s stories as "tough, tough, but yet written using sentences of the most ordinary kind, and constructed with slow Chekhovian care". Readers unfamiliar with Chekhov, or with Alice Munro’s work, can now buy her collections of short stories which book-stores will be marketing with some zeal in the weeks ahead.

It’s not small town life that will excite and please readers. Rather, it is the fact that Munro’s writing is a great example of the writer who illuminates universal themes by writing about the seemingly small and particular. Most people’s lives deal with the small and the particular. Increasingly, though, people are inhabiting a universal, a planetizing, a globalizing, world seen through the lens of the print and electronic media. But peoples’ lives are still lived, for the most part, in a small, small place of family and friends, job and local interests.

“Her traditional-seeming stories are anything but,” wrote one reviewer. “She’ll shift multiple points of view or time schemes — hair-raisingly complicated stuff — not to show off formally but to find a means of packing her stories with maximum density. She’s the most savage writer I’ve ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive.”

Part 3:

The only short-stories I remember reading were in high school. I grew up in a small town in Ontario, and then spent many years in other small towns in: other parts of Ontario, in the Canadian Arctic and in several states of Australia.

The Swedish Academy said it picked the 82-year-old author—known for her easy-to-read writing style charting the struggles and moral conflicts of everyday characters in rural Ontario—because she is the "master of the contemporary short story." Fellow Canadian writer and much more well-known, Margaret Atwood, said of Munro in her introduction to a collection of Munro's stories: "The wallowing in the seamier and meaner and more vengeful undersides of human nature, the telling of erotic secrets, the nostalgia for vanished miseries, and rejoicing in the fullness and variety of life, stirred all together: this is Alice Munro."

Part 4:

After her 20 year marriage ended in 1972 when she was 40, Munro moved back to Ontario, remarried and continued to set most of her stories in the small-town environs of Huron County, which she says caused her the ''level of irritation'' she needed for writing. Huron county is in the southwest part of Ontario. The county seat is Goderich, also the county's largest settlement.

I remember going to Goderich back in the 1950s to a youth camp organized by one of the denominations of Protestantism. It was during the hottest part of a Canadian summer. I had become more interested in the Baha’i Faith at the time, and this Faith still holds my allegiance. I never joined the folds of any one of the many sects and denominations of that major branch of Christianity. I don’t recall ever going to Huron county again after that summer. Oh, and just for the record, Munro says that her religion is “fiction.”

Part 5:

My life has been so very different from Munro’s. My first marriage of 8 years ended in 1973 when I was 29. That was the year Patrick White won the Nobel Prize. I was living in South Australia at the time and teaching high school. I then moved on to Tasmania, and remarried in 1975. I had moved to Australia from Canada when I was 26. Munro got divorced that same year.

Munro published her first story in 1950 at the age of 19. I was only six back in 1950. She knew she wanted to be a writer just about from the word go. A writer’s life has only grown slowly on me, by sensible and insensible degrees, from my teens and 20s into to my mid-50s when I took an early retirement at the age of 55 from the teaching profession, and a 50 year student-working life: 1949 to 1999.

Part 6:

I read novels at high school, and very occasionally over the decades, especially historical fiction. I taught them in the late 1980s and early 1990s in my role as a literature teacher in Australia. The rest of my 60 year reading life from 1953 to 2013, has been as a student-and-teacher, lecturer and tutor, writer and author, poet and publisher, editor and researcher, online blogger, journalist and scholar, among many other roles and statuses over my 70 years in the lifespan.

Reading novels has always been at the periphery of my intellectual life, a life filled with the social sciences, autobiography and biography, as well as the physical, biological and applied sciences. Reading short stories can been even further out among the literary stars in the galaxy that has been my reading life. -Ron Price with thanks to: (1) several major newspapers, as well as book and literature sites for their reviews of Munro’s writing and her life.

Part 7:

I hardly knew you, Alice.
We shared life in a small
town in Ontario, and we’ve
both written a great deal, eh?

But that is just about where
this comparison of our two
lives ends. What can I say,
Alice? Congratulations are
certainly in order, but you’ll
never know me as much as I
know you. You are rich and
famous, & I am one of many
millions of ‘also-rans’ in that
literary world which we both
share in such different ways.

I wish you well as you go on to
finish your life before entering
that hole from which none of us
ever returns, where one writes no
more…..Finish your work, Alice,
surely there is more to say and do?(1)

The roll will soon be called-up
yonder, for me too, Alice, for me
too, but without fame and wealth,
& none of the famed short-stories.

I’m into a whole lot of other stuff
that will keep me busy until that
last syllable of my recorded days.

(1) Munro said in an interview after she received the Nobel Prize that she may just keep on writing, but she was not sure. After 70 years of writing she had expressed the desire to stop.

Ron Price
13/10/’13.

This was nicely done, Ron Price! An interesting way to present a self-reflection, engaging. From this piece, I learned a bit more about her life as well as further points of view on her writing. I am glad to discover this author, although I usually do not prefer short stories. Your life sounds interesting, as well!

Thanks, Buh4Bee, for your quick and encouraging response. After some 70 years of living I still need encouragement. I wish you well in your personal and professional life. You have certainly been active at this site with more than 3000 posts. You deserve a prize.-Ron Price, Australia

Before passing on, and leaving Alice Munro with her Nobel Prize, I'll add the following:

Section 1:

Objects are by nature symbolic, bathed with significance beyond mere functionality; no surface, then, is mere surface, because the more vividly a surface can be seen, the more light shines from it to irradiate, not only itself, but also itself in relation to the world around it. The use of surface details to reveal the essential is a central aspect of my style, although my descriptive faculty needs to be sharpened. I am not in the same league as Alice Munro who finally won the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 2013.

This interest in surfaces focuses upon the impenetrability of a certain face, indeed, of much of the physical reality that I see. Within my narrative stories the notion of an image, stilled and passive, is often to be held in tension with that of another image with which it seems to be in contradiction. This particular narrative that is my life centres on the tension between the photograph and the photographer, the image and my eye. The only way in which reality can be "held still and held together--radiant, everlasting" is in that kind of art in which "as honest an attempt " as possible has been made "to get at what is really there," in all its mystery and dullness, its depth and its simplicity; and this is the kind of art that some writers, I among them, most admire.(1) I do not possess this skill to anything like the extent of my fellow Canadian writer, and 13 years my senior, Alice Munro.

Section 2:

Writing is problematic. James Agee(1909-1955), an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic, and one of the most influential film critics in the U.S, discussed this problematic quality. Agee's autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize, and he pointed out more than a half century ago in an interview, the following: "writing draws in to the point of a pin and then it spreads out flat like a quoit." For those of you who have forgotten what a quoit is: it is ring of iron, rope, or rubber thrown in a game to encircle or land as near as possible to an upright peg. It is a game consisting of aiming and throwing such rings.

"Some of the time," said Agee, "you are writing for all men who are your equals and your superiors, and some of the time for all the deceived and captured, and some of the time for nobody. Some of the time you are trying to communicate but not necessarily to please." These words of Agee were published in the Partisan Review in 1939.

I am concerned to decipher a pattern over time, and I am also interested in the unresolvable enigmas of each moment. I am drawn to the analogy between the power of the camera to capture instantaneous images, and the nature of perception, which works in short, sharp flashes. The challenge is in presenting ambivalent reality as something constantly to be reshaped into a personal truth. But reality, for me, is also incorrigibly plural, and its plurality can most readily be apprehended through paradoxical physical appearances. Because the photograph both invites and defies interpretation, it holds out microcosmically the ground of my writing.

It may be that the pictures must be accepted as discrete mysteries, whose validity is to be experienced through a heightened appreciation of their otherness. My position is that the pictures, the photos, must be seen, made, into a pattern that takes account of time: this emphasis on the necessity of narrative context points up the similarities between Sontag's epistemology and my literary concerns. The photograph is the realised image from within the negative "black eye"; and yet, as Sontag asserts, "Photographs do not explain; they acknowledge.” As a result, they make available to the writer a real past, framed and held out for her to respond to, without predetermining that response. The photograph "cannot say what it lets us see.” It is the business of the writer to enable us to see more acutely, and to see beneath. Whether this is primarily a spatial or a temporal extension will depend upon the epistemological position of the artist.--Ron Price with thanks to: (1) J.R. (Tim) Struthers, "The Real Material; An Interview with Alice Munro," Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, ed. Louis K. MacKendrick, ECW, Downsview, 1983, p.6.

Since Alice Munro is in an interview tonight with Margaret Atwood, so I have been informed on my Facebook page this evening(23/1/'14), I will post some pieces I wrote on Margaret Atwood.-Ron Price, Australia
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PINNING

Part 1:

Margaret Atwood, famous Canadian writer, said in an interview in 1978: “I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn't write. I started again at 16. And have no idea why, but writing was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.” My life-narrative, my life-experience, with writing was very different from Atwood’s. I did not have the feeling that writing was “the only thing I wanted to do” until at least 1992, and insensibly and increasingly until I retired from teaching in 1999. By then I was 55.

Atwood also made the comment that "in North America people have a somewhat romantic notion….about what an author is." "They think of "writing" not as something you do but as something you are," she went on to say. "The writer is seen as "expressing" herself; therefore, her books must be autobiographical. If the book was seen as something made, like a pot, we probably wouldn't have this difficulty.” As a North American, and until the age of 25 a resident of Canada, I hold some of this romantic view. As a person who has lived more than half his life in the Antipodes I see my writing a little like a pot, but only a little.

Part 2:

Atwood went on to say: “My parents were great readers. They didn't encourage me to become a writer, exactly, but they gave me a more important kind of support; that is, they expected me to make use of my intelligence and abilities, but they did not pressure me(and I paraphrase) in any particular direction. My mother was rather exceptional in this respect from what I can tell from the experiences of other young people my own age. Remember that all this was taking place in the 1950's, when marriage was seen as the only desirable goal and parents pushed their kids this way and that.” This could very well describe my parents. My mother, like Atwood’s, was a very lively person who would rather read poetry than scrub floors. My father scrubbed a lot of floors and did many things in life I scarcely appreciated back then. -Ron Price with thanks to Margaret Atwood in “Margaret Atwood: Poet,” Joyce Carol Oats, New York Times on the Web, May 21st 1978.

I am absolutely dependent on the details
of the material world to make a space for
my prose-poetry to move in & around in.

It's dangerous to lift a statement out of
context, out of my poem, and take it as
my view, the poet’s view. The cultural
attitudes in poems are not invented by
poets; they’re reflections of something
the poet sees in the society around him.

Yeats once said that solitary imagination
makes and unmakes mankind and even
the world itself, for does not the 'eye alter
all'?.......Poetry is one of those things that
can't ever be quite pinned down, but still
I do a lot of pinning…...I’ve been pinning
for years, and I’ll be pinning for years.(1)

(1) Much of this prose-poem is taken from this interview published in The New York Times seven months before I left Ballarat for Tasmania, and exchanged a good teaching job for the dole.

Ron Price
28/5/’06 to 26/5/’13.
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ATWOOD, LUTHER, AND ME

Section 1:

Margaret Atwood(1939- ) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She graduated from high school in Toronto the year I entered my last year of primary school in Burlington just 30 miles away: 1957. We are both war-babies, or members of what some social scientists call the silent generation(1919-1945). Atwood was always about 5 years ahead of me since she was born at the start of the war, while I was born toward that war's end.

Considered by one generational descriptor as “cautious, unimaginative and withdrawn,” members of our generation, the war-babies, grew up in the late 1940s and 1950s at a time of social conformity and, “looking for a type of rebirth.”(1) They needed a cause. Both Atwood and I only fit some aspects of this generation descriptor. We both needed a cause. For me, during the years 1953 to 1959, it became the Baha’i Faith. I've been a Baha'i now for 55 years(1959-2014). Atwood is one of Canada’s most successful writers with more than a dozen volumes of poetry and 20 volumes of prose to her credit.

Section 2:

Atwood got her M.A. in 1962 in literature, the same year I finished my last year of hometown baseball, entered my last year of high school, and began my travelling-pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community in the small town of Dundas Ontario at the heart of Ontario's Golden Horseshoe. As my teaching career developed from primary, to secondary, to post-secondary levels, and as I traveled and worked from town to town in both Canada and Australia, in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, Atwood published book after book. She was catapulted to celebrity status in 1972, the first year I left Canada. That year I began living in Australia as an international pioneer from Canada, the year I helped establish the first locally elected Baha’i assembly in the steel-port city of Whyalla South Australia, and in western and central Australia outside of the capital cities.

Her book: "Survival" provided for Canadians like myself a wonderful insight into Canadian literature and into our very sense of identity.(2) -Ron Price with thanks to (1)M. Nowak and D.T. Miller, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were, Doubleday & Co. Inc., N.Y. 1977, p.18; and (2) Joyce Carol Oates, “Margaret Atwood’s Tale,” The New York Review of Books, 2 November 2006.

Yes, Margaret Atwood, I liked
your characterization and your
leitmotifs of Canadians about a
sense of survival….not triumph
or victory, like the Americans,
and not about those who made it….
but those who made-it-back……

I made it back, Margaret, from a
Baffin Island crash: ‘here I stand’
as Martin Luther said about half a
millennium ago at the outset of a
Protestant-German Reformation.1

1 Luther is sometimes quoted as saying: "Here I stand. I can do no other". Recent scholars consider the evidence for these words to be unreliable, since they were inserted before "May God help me" only in later versions of the speech and not recorded in witness accounts of the proceedings. -Richard Marius, Luther, Quartet, London, 1975, p.155.

Ron Price
8/1/’12 to 26/5/’13.
---------------------------------
MY STORY IS DIFFERENT, MARGARET

The writer, the poet, is an observer, a witness, and such observations are the air they breathe. The poem, the writing, is a vehicle, for their human responsibility. It is a form of testament, a form of eye-witness account, an I-witnessing. The overall opus can often be said to comprise one story. For Margaret Atwood it is what she calls the story of the disaster which is the world.1 For Ron Price it is what he calls Pioneering Over Five Epochs. Ron Price with thanks to 1Margaret Atwood in Women Writers: Margaret Atwood, Barbara Hill Rigney, Barnes and Noble Books, Totowa, NJ, 1987, p.17.

Yes, Margaret, there is pain, tragedy,
disaster, fatigue, fear and loathing in
this Age of Transition, & this eve of
destruction, in which I’ve played my
part. I’ve told it as I’ve seen it in all
these poems, Margaret, in this border
country, this half light, and this new
generation of dawnbreaking, in this
burgeoning world of the dazzling &
the chaotic, in this waiting world, the
not-yet-arrived, the not here yet, the
dream and the reality, the beginnings,
chrysalis, the endless repitition, & the
hearing of the story and its meaning
again and again until it has dried out
your soul inside of despair’s bleached
skull, as Roger White put it long ago.

Of course, there’s a flip-side, Margaret;
one of vision, of hope, where one can
just about taste the fragrances, rich &
deep, with meaning. And now, a place
where the light of the countenance of God1
shines before me like a beakon in the night.

1 Baha’u’llah, The Tablet of Carmel.

Ron Price
13/2/’99 to 26/5/’13.
---------------------------------------------
FULFILLING HIS TRUST

Margaret Atwood, Canadian author, explained how she wrote a series of poems that became The Journals of Susanna Moodie:1 “They came as separate poems and I had no idea when I began that I was going to end up with a book of that size. It wasn’t planned that way. I wrote twelve at first and stopped and thought, you know, this is just short of a long short poem, twelve short poems, that’s it. And then I started writing more of them but I didn’t know where it was going. I don’t write books of poetry as books. I don’t write them like novels.”22

My poetry was similar to Atwood’s in terms of the process of writing. My pieces too “came as separate poems and I had no idea when I began that I was going to end up with a book” or books of poems the size or the extent to which I now have. “It wasn’t planned that way;” I wrote some 200 poems until the age of 47; of these I kept about 170. That’s about 5 poems a year from adolescence, the age of 13, to 47--35 years—or a poem every 75 days. Not exactly prolific. “And then I started writing more of them” in 1992. “But I didn’t know where it was going.” In the years 1992 to 2005 I wrote some 6000 poems. “I don’t write books of poetry as books. I don’t write them like novels.” I write a batch of about 100 and put them in a plastic binding and give them to some Baha’i group.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Oxford UP, Toronto, 1970; and 2Margaret Atwood in Graeme Gibson, Eleven Canadian Novelists, Anansi, Toronto, 1972, p.164.

This is no novel but there’s
a central character, a story,
a set of ideas, a philosophy,
a serendipitous arrangement,
sequentially ordered with pattern
and images in a clear, an especially
modern sensibility, millions of words.

There’s a darker side to this persona,
this self in society and its exploration
is part of the trip, the journey through
a complex society and a new religion,
a series of coming to terms with people,
jobs, self, religion, the land, change---
as a tempest sweeps the face of the earth
in unpredictable, unprecedented ways.

After seeing little meaning in my world
around me at the start of my pioneering
journey in ’62, slowly, a union, vision,
past, present and future fell before my eyes,
insinuating, unobtrusive, with wonder,
awe, the foundation of the poetic me1
in a poem that is never finished and
helps me fulfill in my life His trust.2

1 D. H. Lawrence quoted in The Psychic Mariner: A Reading of the Poems of D.H. Lawrence, Tom Marshall, Heinemann, London, 1970, p.3. 2 Baha’u’llah, Hidden Words, p.1

Ron Price
September 18th 2005
---------------------------------------------------------------
MORE TRUSTWORTHY?

Yesterday, while reading in the Launceston library I read some of a biography of Margaret Atwood. On the front page it read: Never trust biographies. Too many events in a man's life are invisible, as unknown to others as our dreams. The autobiographer, on the other hand, can tell of these invisible events and of HIS dreams and, to that extent, autobiographies are potentially more trustworthy. My autobiography, spread over several genres, certainly tells of this invisible world, as best I can. It is my hope that it provides, not only a more trustworthy document but one that is a pleasure to read. -Ron Price with thanks to Anne Michaels in Margaret Atwood: A Biography, Nathalie Cooke, Ecw Press, Toronto, 1998, p.5

We need to feel we understand
the world we live in, making
sense of these our days with
a persuasive portrait of who
we are as people and what
our lives are or should be about---

can it be recorded here?
Is this philosophico-religious
vision of reality, with answers
and values to live by. This need,
for some, is a cry of anguish.1
With others there seems to be
no cry at all.

1 Ayn Rand's philosophy

Ron Price
7 November 2001
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AMBIGUITY

Price’s poetic meanderings, his immersion in the process of defining his journey, is partly his way of discovering his past, his childhood, his ancestral roots, his psycho-history; partly his way of defining his identity, his complex personality, his many selves and what composed them; partly his way of giving form and substance to a religious conviction that had, in one way or another, consumed his life and given it meaning; and partly his way of giving expression to the relativity and multiplicity of truth’s many-coloured glass. -Ron Price with thanks to Margaret Atwood in Women Writers: Margaret Atwood, Barbara Hill Rigney, Barnes and Noble Books, Totowa, NJ, 1987.

Yes, Margaret, they defy classification:
men, women, ideas: gray, complicated,
multidimensional, like everything else.
Yet, we classify the ambiguous, the
inexact, the passionate waters, the
incorrigibly murky rivers of our days.

We strive for precision with our
fastidiousness and our disposition
to overcome the casual. With our
logic, our science and our desire
to sanitize our art we assault the
endless ambiguity and create our
necessary universal definitions!!

In the end, though, we are left
with the subtle, the allusive, the
figurative, the nuances, the ironic,
the ambivalent, the handmaiden
of mysticism, a savoring of mystery:
ambiguity, the promoter of community
in our quest for meaning, our quest
beyond the univocal into a thousand
faces, a thousand voices, a thousand eyes.

Ron Price
13 February 1999
---------------------------------------------------
KEEPING IT IN

The novelists Iris Murdoch and Margaret Atwood1 say that people need secrets. They are a right and proper part of being human. The world today is obsessed with not having secrets, with letting it all hang out, with telling it all. These novelists argue that someone with no secrets is an impossibility. Beginning, perhaps, with St. Augustine, but certainly with the diarist Samuel Pepys in 1659-1669,2 we find men and women who loved themselves and from a fullness of their knowledge they felt a love for others. They were curious about the world; with their eyes and ears wide open they observed the world. With a genuine and sometimes superficial gregariousness Pepys hid his secret, self-obsessed, hermetic existence, the place where he wrote for himself in such a delightfully frank way with a special zest to tell it all and with fresh observational details and a less than deep analysis. -Ron Price with thanks to 1 Helen Elliott, "The Sting in the Tale," The Australian: The Review, 3 March 2001, pp.4-5 and 2 Robert Louis Stevenson, "Modern History Sourcebook," Samuel Pepys, 1886.

You can't tell it all:
that's plain to see.
Not everything can
be disclosed.
It's better to keep it in
sometimes, the wise course,
the sensible middle,
a question of timing,
suited to the ears,
the sane line.

I've said this before.
I don't tell it all;
I keep some back,
just about all the time,
in poems and in life.


Ron Price
3 March 2001
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