Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013

Front matter

Reading

Alice Munro

1973-2013

Part One: Narrative Techniques, Forms, and Critical Issues: Establishing a Presence

Clear Jelly: Alice Munro’s Narrative Dialectics (1983) Connection: Alice Munro and Ontario (1984)

Critical Interlude: Conferring Munro (1987)

Munro’s Progress: A Review of The Progress of Love (1987)

“So Shocking a Verdict in Real Life”: Autobiography in Alice Munro’s Stories” (1988)

Critical Interlude: Go Ask Alice: The Progress of Munro Criticism (1991)

ix

Part Two: What the Archives Reveal: Reading a Deepening Aesthetic Alice Munro’s Willa Cather (1992)

Alice Munro, Writing “Home”: “Seeing This Trickle in Time” (1998)

Critical Interlude: What’s “Material”?: The Progress of Munro Criticism, Part 2 (1998)

Part Three: Understanding the Oeuvre Alice Munro’s Ontario (2007)

A “Booming Tender Sadness”: Alice Munro’s Irish (2008) No Problem Here: A Review of Too Much Happiness (2009)

“The Way the Skin of the Moment Can Break Open”: Reading Alice Munro’s “White Dump” (2010)

Critical Interlude: Alice Munro: Critical Reception (2013)

Afterword: “A Wonderful Stroke of Good Fortune for Me”: Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013

Notes Works Cited

Ill 115

133 145

197 201

217 227 231

271 285 301 viii Reading Alice Munro | ROBERT THACKER

Acknowledgments

“Clear Jelly: Alice Munro’s Narrative Dialectics” first appeared in Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s Narrative Acts. Ed. Louis K. McKendrick. Downsview: ECW Press, 1983. 37-60. Republished with permission.

“Connection: Alice Munro and Ontario” first appeared in The American Review of Canadian Studies 14 (1984): 213-26. Copyright the American Association for Canadian Studies (ACSUS), reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of ACSUS.

“Conferring Munro” first appeared in Essays on Canadian Writing 34 (1987): 162-69. Republished with permission.

“Munro's Progress” first appeared in Canadian Literature 115 (1987): 239-42.

“So Shocking a Verdict in Real Life” Autobiography in Alice Munro's Stories” first appeared in Reflections: Autobiography and Canadian Literature. Ed. K. P. Stich. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1988. 153-61.

“Go Ask Alice: The Progress of Munro Criticism” first appeared in the Journal of Canadian Studies 26 (Summer 1991): 156—69. Republished with permission.

“Alice Munro’s Willa Cather” first appeared in Canadian Literature 134 (1992): 42-57.

“Alice Munro and the Anxiety of American Influence” first appeared in Context North America: Canadian / U.S. Literary Relations. Ed. Camille La Bossiére. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1994. 133-44.

“Alice Munro, Writing ‘Home’: “Seeing This Trickle in Time” first appeared in Essays on Canadian Writing 66 (Winter 1998): 1-20. Republished with permission.

“What's “Material’?: The Progress of Munro Criticism, Part 2” Journal of Canadian Studies 33 (Summer 1998): 196-210. Republished with permission.

“Mapping Munro: Reading the “Clues” first appeared in Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story. Ed. Gerald Lynch. Ottawa: U Ottawa P, 1999. 127-35. Republished with permission.

“Alice Munro’s Ontario” first appeared Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writing in Context. Ed. Marta Dvorak and W. H. New. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2007. 103-118.

“A ‘Booming Tender Sadness’: Alice Munro’s Irish” first appeared in Canada: Text and Territory. Ed. Maire Aine Ni Mhainnin and Elizabeth Tilley. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 132—40. Republished with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

“No Problem Here” first appeared in the Literary Review of Canada 17.7 (September 2009): 19. Republished with the permission of the Literary Review of Canada.

“The Way the Skin of the Moment Can Break Open”: Reading Alice Munro's “White Dump” first appeared in Canadian Notes & Queries 79 (Spring/Summer 2010): 24-29. Republished with permission.

“Alice Munro: Critical Reception” first appeared in Critical Insights: Alice Munro. Ed. Charles E. May. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press/EBSCO, 2013. 29— 51. Republished with permission of EBSCO Information Services, Ipswich, MA.

x Reading Alice Munro | ROBERT THACKER

Introduction:

Alice Munro's “Approach and Recognition”

This book is an exercise in literary, professional, and personal history. Sometime in the fall or winter of 1973/74, when I was 22 years old and a recent university graduate planning to marry and trying to figure out just what I would try to do in this life, having pretty much decided on graduate school in Canada, I received my first issue of a subscription to the Tamarack Review: number 61 (November 1973). It opened with a new story, “Material,” by someone unknown to me, a writer named Alice Munro. Seeing that magazine as my first independent foray into Canadian writing, I read the story, was struck hard by it, and found myself hooked: if this was Canadian literature, I thought, then sign me up.

And so I signed up. I moved north from my native Ohio during the summer of 1974 to begin graduate work at the University of Waterloo— my new wife and I entered Canada on that August day when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, and we listened to his speech as we drove along the 401: we were embarking on a new direction in a new country. By then, “Material” had appeared again, this time as the second story in Munro’s third book, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), published that May by McGraw-Hill Ryerson. The brief biography on its dust jacket noted Munro’s beginnings in Wingham, Ontario, her time in university, and her marriage, saying that afterwards she moved to Victoria,

British Columbia, “where she has lived until recently.” She was then living in London, Ontario, and during that academic year was the writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario, where she had been a student herself. After over 20 years on the West Coast, Munro had come home.

Meanwhile, I began my studies at Waterloo, and although mostly I was doing what newly embarked graduate students did—reading, trying to keep up with my courses, figuring out what directions to go in—I had begun watching Munro and her career closely. I read and studied her first two books, and in my second term I served as teaching assistant in a course on Ontario writing; there I taught my first formal class, a lecture on Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), Munro’s first book. At the same time, I was thinking about doing my MA thesis on the Ontario small town in fiction, with a consideration of Munro among other writers. As it turned out, I narrowed the focus of my writing, first to just Munro and then, shaping my material in terms of narrative technique, to just the uncollected stories from the 1950s and those in Dance of the Happy Shades. I took as my title an apt descriptive phrase from “Material”: “A fine and lucky benevolence” (Something 43). While this was happening, Munro had finished her residency at Western and had reconnected with Gerald Fremlin, an old attraction from her undergraduate days. By August 1975 she had moved to Clinton, Ontario—back to Huron County, just south of Wingham—to live there with Fremlin. There Munro continued to write another 11 books, and in 2013 the unalloyed excellence of that writing won her the Nobel Prize in Literature—the first Canadian to be so honoured.

These contexts present a first rationale for Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013. I discovered Munro and her writing at a propitious moment in my own career and, as it turned out, at such a moment in hers as well. Because of Dance of the Happy Shades—which won the Governor General’s Award—and Lives of Girls and Women (1971)—which became a feminist cri de coeur and also won a major award—Munro’s writing was, during the early 1970s, beginning to receive real academic attention. The first published articles date from those years, a time of both deep English- Canadian nationalism and a concurrent demand—both in the universities and in the culture more broadly—for greater attention to Canadian writers and their works. Read Canadian! was an imperative frequently heard, read, and repeated. Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and especially her Survival—both published in 1972, urtexts each—were indicative of the times. Along with many others, Munro’s growing reputation was both noticed and celebrated, seen as further evidence of the emergence of Canadian literature as an academic specialty.

Concurrently, Munro’s move back to Ontario in 1973 at the end of her marriage and her eventual return to Huron County in 1975—to her home place, putting her “in the midst of, so to speak, my material,” as Munro once wrote (proof Who 229)—set the stage for her emergence as a powerful writer. That is, just as her work was beginning to receive significant attention as a part of Canadian literature, Munro, an established writer in her mid-40s, returned home and saw her material anew, with different eyes and a different understanding. In late 1973, too, she wrote a memoir story called “Home” (which she published in a collection of new writing the following year but withheld from including in a book of her own until 2006). Her material became more immediate, no longer recalled through time and memory from far away, off in British Columbia. Once settled in Clinton, Munro turned to the aesthetic struggles that defined, in part, her breakthrough collections Who Do You Think You Are? (1978) and The Moons of Jupiter (1982), the latter something of a legacy volume from the former. Here the structures of her stories became more complex. It was during this time, too, that Munro hired as her agent Virginia Barber, who successfully brought her stories to the attention of American commercial magazines; by far the most prominent of these—and longstanding in its relationship with Munro—was the New Yorker. When the Nobel Prize was announced, that magazine’s editors republished her “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (1999-2000) as a tribute to her accomplishment and for its own special recognition. It was Munro’s 63rd appearance in the New Yorker.

Once I had submitted my thesis on Munro to the University of Waterloo in 1976, I headed west to begin doctoral studies at the University of Manitoba. Although my focus there was largely on other things, I kept working on Munro, and in 1979 offered “Alice Munro and the Critics: A Paradigm” as my third academic conference paper to the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States (ACSUS). It began with a stern exposé and denunciation of thematic criticism as applied to Munro. That approach was then holding sway in analyses of Canadian writing generally, most especially through the influence of Atwood’s Survival; thematic articles on Munro’s work had linked her to larger “Canadian” themes such as Northrop Frye’s idea of the garrison mentality. Some of the early essays on Munro had approached her work through this idea. Asserting the inappropriateness of such analysis for Munro, I suggested rather that the strength of her stories lay in their narrative, in the techniques she used in writing them, and in their mimetic recreation of 1930s and 1940s Ontario, as they were remembered. The polemic portion of the essay— which my editor then called “your kamikaze attack”—was later dropped, and the balance of the essay became “Clear Jelly: Alice Munro’s Narrative Dialectics” (1983), the first essay in the first critical book on Munro. It is also the first essay included here.

I followed “Clear Jelly” at regular intervals with other essays and reviews on Munro’s fiction, an annotated bibliography in 1984, and a succession of pieces focused on Munro criticism, the most recent appearing in 2013. In 2000 my focus shifted to biography when Munro agreed to cooperate on a book about her literary life; Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives was published in 2005 and was revised as an updated paperback in 2011. Once that book was completed I returned to critical writing on Munro, taking up new subjects I had noticed along the way as I researched my book—such as Munro’s Irish heritage and her story “White Dump” (1985), which concludes what I consider to be one of Munro’s best collections, The Progress of Love (1986). Those two essays are included here. I plan to keep doing this, for as long as I can, while keeping an eye on the factual details of Munro’s ongoing career.

The intention of Reading Alice Munro, 1973—2013 is to use a selection of my essays—most of them, actually—to track a perpetually deepening fascination with Munro’s writing and, because of that writing and its effects, with her life and the trajectory of her writing career. Although it is not intended as a monograph critical study of Munro’s work—her work has long seemed beyond such treatment—my hope is that, when it is read sequentially within a single volume, along with the contextualizations I offer along the way, readers will be able to see and understand the gradual making of an entire, most remarkable career. To this end, the essays are arranged chronologically and, because of separate emphases, divided into three sections. Each of these sections, as well, derives from a single decade. The first deals with techniques, forms, and publishing contexts during the 1980s; the second, made up of pieces that were published during the 1990s, reflects my frequent use during that period of the Alice Munro fonds at the University of Calgary and takes up issues revealed by the archival materials found there, along with gauging the deepened complexities of her fiction. The third section, “Understanding the Oeuvre,” is made up of essays published after Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. These both derive from and straddle that biographical work: the first, “Alice Munro’s Ontario,” which extends analyses begun in the 1980s, was written before the biography but revised after it. The others were directly derived from that work: “A ‘Booming Tender Sadness’: Alice Munro’s Irish” owes itself to my study in the Calgary archives of the contexts of Munro’s television script, “1847: The Irish” (1978), and of its story version, “A Better Place Than Home” (1979). Similarly, the essay on “White Dump” owes itself to the better understanding I came to of that story’s importance through reading its archival contexts.

Also included in that section is my short review of Too Much Happiness, one of six reviews I have included here. It, like the other short review, “Munro's Progress,” a review of The Progress of Love, serves to define a particular moment in Munro’s career. With that book, as I think the review makes clear, Munro reached a higher level of accomplishment than readers had seen previously, and with that review I tried to articulate what I then saw, and still see, as her increasing acuity during the 1980s—the results of her return to Huron County, where she lived “in the midst, so to speak, of [her] material.” Similarly, the publication of Too Much Happiness in 2009 allowed for the same sort of analysis, with—ever innovative, this writer—some consideration of the unique qualities of that volume’s title story; in some ways, it is unlike any other Munro story. That review also allowed me to take up, and to attempt to refute, some reviewers of The View from Castle Rock (2006) who had made almost no attempt to understand, let alone appreciate, the core significance of that book. This seemed an especially necessary action because, and this is clear, The View from Castle Rock will ultimately be seen as utterly crucial to any thorough understanding of Munro’s oeuvre. Looking back now, Munro appears to have been heading toward The View from Castle Rock for much of her writing career.

In the same way, I have interleaved four review essays within the three sections—I have called them “critical interludes,” and in various ways they establish the larger contexts the essays explore. Published at intervals—respectively in 1987, 1991, 1998, and 2013—these pieces offer a comprehensive overview of Munro’s critical reception from the 1980s on. Read today they are certainly a bit cheeky, and also stern and insistent, but they seem also to still capture some of the energy of their times. Although I had initially thought to place these review essays in a section of their own, I ultimately decided that reading each review essay within the trajectories of the times, the one seen in relation to the other and to the other essays, made more sense. This contextualization also recreates moments in literary history, a feeling for the times—something that Iam after. Finally, Reading Alice Munro concludes, as a postlude, with an afterword that considers Dear Life (2012), its “Finale,” and the Nobel Prize as likely conclusions to Munro’s career.

In a recent essay focused on the importance of A. E. Housman to Willa Cather, I drew on Munro and invoked her story “Wenlock Edge” (2005), most especially its differing endings—the ending in the New Yorker version versus the final one found in Too Much Happiness (Thacker “One”). When she first submitted the story to the New Yorker in July 2005, it ended with this statement from the narrator: “I discovered that Uricon was Wroxeter, a Roman camp on the Severn River” (Submitted 29). The reference is to Housman’s “On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble” (poem 31) from A Shropshire Lad (1896), seen by scholars as among the best in that collection. Munro revised this sentence for the final version published in the New Yorker, and it came just after the narrator observes other students who were “on a course, as [she] was, of getting to know the ways of their own wickedness” (91). By the time “Wenlock Edge” appeared in Too Much Happiness, having been held out of The View from Castle Rock, Munro had dropped this particular reference to Uricon, although obviously the reference to the poem remains in the story’s title, along with the larger presence of Housman through quotations of his poems. In my essay on Housman and Cather, too, I invoke W. H. Auden’s elegiac poem, “A. E. Housman” (1939), which, after a caustic portrait of the other poet (“He timidly attacked the life he led”), concludes that “only geographical divisions / Parted the coarse hanged soldier from the don” (182). “I kept on learning things,” Munro’s narrator says in the New Yorker version, just before she tells us “that Uricon, the Roman camp, is now Wroxeter, a town on the Severn River” (91).

I mention these cruxes here for various reasons. The first is autobiographical. As a Munro scholar, I began focusing in the 1980s on her narratives and evocations of Ontario’s Huron County as a fully imagined place. I also attended, more than most others, to the progress of both Munro’s own publication and that of critics and reviewers on her work. Although the internet and searchable databases have made published bibliographies largely obsolete, during the 1980s and into the 1990s my annotated Munro bibliography was the place for students to start discovering her critical contexts. Early in the 1980s, too, Munro began donating her papers to the University of Calgary, an archive I first visited in January 1988. Quite literally, its contents transformed the ways I went about my Munro scholarship: they often reveal the exact extent of her activity as a writer, they provide biographical nuance wherever one looks, and they define a trajectory for her career.

My first visit to the Alice Munro fonds in Calgary coincided with the period when I was concluding revisions to my doctoral thesis and transforming it into a book, The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination (New Mexico, 1989). While doing that work, I discovered my other writer, Willa Cather. Simply put, Cather was the first writer to really contend with the imaginative effects of the prairie-plains space on the Euro-American imagination, especially in her early prairie novels O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and, most pointedly, My Antonia (1918).

My initial discoveries in Calgary drew me into the archives, and not just Munro’s. At the time the only way scholars could see Cather’s autograph letters was to visit numerous archives all around the United States. Having conceived of a second book project, “Connection: A Woman’s Place in the Writing of Emily Carr, Willa Cather, Margaret Laurence, and Alice Munro,” one I envisioned as based in the archival materials of

Introduction: Alice Munro's "Approach and Recognition" FA each author, I set about visiting archives and gathering materials. It was to be an analysis of each writer’s relationship to her own particular “home place”—Wright Morris’s phrase—an analysis grounded in feminist and place theory. Although I may yet complete the book (a sizable portion of a draft exists), I ultimately set it aside in order to research and write Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. The effects of my growing familiarity with the Munro archive are evident in my published criticism. It is evident first in “So Shocking a Verdict in Real Life’: Autobiography in Alice Munro’s Stories” (1988), but it is probably most evident in “Alice Munro’s Willa Cather,” which first appeared in Canadian Literature in 1992, and in the balance of the essays that followed. As both Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives and this book show, once I discovered archival research generally and the Alice Munro fonds at the University of Calgary in particular (I may be the only person who has read the entire Munro archive there), my scholarship was transformed—both in how I have read Munro and how I continue to read her work. And that reading has been continual, for as the years have passed and I have gone from Munro critic and bibliographer to biographer and critic, Munro and her works have loomed ever larger in my personal ken. Although I still do critical and historical work on the North American West, derived from the contexts I examined in The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination, Munro and Cather have become the primary subjects of my career.

After the autobiographical crux, there are two others in need of addressing here: first, my decision to republish these essays without revision beyond formatting, mechanical correction, and some new copy-editing— that is, without updating or substantive revision. Second, there is the matter of my repetitions of quoted passages from her published stories and essays, and from some of her statements.

My thoughts regarding Auden on Housman have most to do with this, certainly, but Auden is relevant in another way: in 1945, Random House brought out its edition of The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden. When preparing it, Auden’s editor Edward Mendelson has written, “Auden gave many of his earlier poems ironic, distancing titles whose tone was (depending on your point of view) either tellingly or irritatingly at odds with the poems they headed.” In subsequent editions Auden “replaced a few of the more flippant titles with neutral ones.” (xxvi). Like Munro and

Cather, Auden is an artist of especial interest to me—a wonderful year-long seminar with Chester Duncan at the University of Manitoba during 1977 to 1978 ensured as much. I am certainly no Auden, but his retitling of his poems in the ways Mendelson describes has always struck me as an ill-advised, regrettable act. That is my point of view and, as such, I have no desire to now revise my younger self.

More especially, Munro’s own poetics are rooted in her Huron County home place—as I often argued, a place she at first remembered across distance and time from British Columbia (1952-73) and then, once she returned in 1973, has both confronted and lived with (and within) since. Situations, incidents, names, and references echo within her stories. A favourite of mine is Munro’s repetition of the name “Mr. Willens” from her “Story for Sunday” (1950), the second story she published in Folio while at the University of Western Ontario, in “The Love of a Good Woman” (1996). That university and its location, London, also echo throughout Munro’s work, in Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), The Beggar Maid (1979), “Family Furnishings” (2001), “Wenlock Edge,” and elsewhere. Most recently, with “Train” (2012), which begins with the character Jackson, who is returning home from the Second World War, jumping off his train before it reaches his station, Munro returns to the material in unpublished stories that she worked on called, variously, “The War Hero” or “The Boy Murderer”; many fragments in the Calgary archives begin with, for example, “Franklin got off the train at Goldenrod, where he didn’t need to” (37.16.28). And of course there is the presence of Munro’s mother in her stories from the late 1950s on, including in the “Finale” of Dear Life (2012).

My point here is twofold: by publishing the essays in much the same form they appeared originally, I am both leaving myself as I was as a critic when the essays were originally published and encouraging readers toward the critical specifics of that time—the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. My critical interludes—the review essays devoted to Munro criticism—do this most explicitly, certainly, but my own essays are meant to do much the same thing. There is continuity, growth, and influence in this. Two examples: “Clear Jelly: Alice Munro’s Narrative Dialectics” (1983), my first published essay on Munro, defined Munro’s retrospective narrative; it has been frequently cited, was recently republished in a volume focused on Dance of the Happy Shades edited by a French scholar (Guignery), and is arguably the basis for Isla Duncan’s narratological study of Munro, Alice Munro’s Narrative Art (2011). A second example, which illustrates both the extension of my thinking and the effect that my discovery of the Munro archives had on my work, can be found in the two essays “Connection: Alice Munro and Ontario” (1984) and “Alice Munro’s Ontario” (2007), both of which conclude with an analysis of the final scene in “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection” (1978). In the earlier essay, I focused on Munro’s evocation of the Ontario small town, using “The Peace of Utrecht” (1960) as my central text and offering an argument largely drawn from my University of Waterloo thesis. In “Alice Munro’s Ontario”—written, as I have said, before Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives but revised after its publication—I examine the original unrevised versions of “Home” (1974) and “Working for a Living” (1981), seeing them as key texts that reveal Munro’s palpable, deep connection to her Huron County home place, to her parents, and to her own personal and cultural history. What Munro achieves in the conclusion of “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection” is not just the well-made fictional artifice of her early work but a deep and resonate verisimilitude rooted in her return to Huron County. Life is but a dream—a dream that is just as it often seems, and often feels—and throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s Munro was compulsively articulating such feelings about her home place.

And then there is the relationship between Munro and Cather. I had not read Munro’s “Dulse” (1980) when I first met her in New York City at one of the publicity events arranged by Alfred A. Knopf for the launch of the US edition of The Moons of Jupiter in March 1983 (at that stage of my life I was often aware of her newly published stories, but I allowed them to myself only sparingly). I had arranged to meet her in order to ask some questions connected to my annotated bibliography, which was then in the making, and was seated next to her at a luncheon. Ever polite, but even then not especially drawn to literary critics, she asked about my interests beyond her writing. Not knowing about “Dulse,” I told her about my interest in and work on Cather and the prairie west, and we had a lively discussion about Cather. That same day at a friend’s place I read “Dulse” and was stunned by its very existence—Munro, of course, had made no mention of it. That evening, at a reading, I told Munro of my discovery.

She said she thought I knew it when we met and talked earlier in the day. No, not at all.

This episode led, a few years later, to a conference paper called “Alice Munro’s Willa Cather” (and occasioned my first real interview—on the telephone—with Munro). After several drafts and with increasing use of the archival holdings on “Dulse” at the University of Calgary, it was eventually published in 1992. Without question, part of my motivation for comparing the two writers has been my own interest in and knowledge of each writer, but there is more to it than that. As Munro shows throughout “Dulse,” she has been a careful reader of Cather’s fiction and of her as a person, too, certainly. But when she visited Grand Manan (around 1978 to 1979) she in effect researched the time Cather spent on the island. That is, she met the prototype for Mr. Stanley—the Cather fanatic in her story—someone whom Cather scholars had met there and been aware of. When I first visited Grand Manan in 1995 to prepare to lead an excursion of a Cather group to the island, I met someone who Munro had also met, and had plucked from those she met there to use in her story. That person had, as Munro writes in “Material,” “passed into Art” (Something 43), and as it happened was not very happy about it: people read Munro’s story and recognized the likeness.

Both Cather and Munro are what I would call organic writers—artists who work with images and memories that both resonate with authenticity and are mimetic in the fullest sense of the term. On reading them, readers stand back, rapt with the way the writing has made them feel, and think that this is how it feels to live, to be alive. Indeed, but in reading them we also feel Munro’s drive toward wisdom and the power of affecting “Art” —a word Munro capitalizes in “Material” to emphasize its significance. As I compare the two of them, I am reminded that in our 1987 telephone interview, Munro mentioned that her favourite Cather story is “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932), which Cather wrote as an homage to her dying mother. For her part, Cather has Godfrey St. Peter, her historian protagonist in The Professors House (1925) remark to a class, “‘Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had’” (69). Wisdom. Art. Munro belongs in my essay on the influence of Housman on Cather because, just as she sees the same qualities in Cather and enumerates them in “Dulse,” so too she senses similar qualities in Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and invokes them in “Wenlock Edge.” (Munro once told me that she could recite whole sections of the poems in A Shropshire Lad from memory. More than that, it is a delight to me that Mr. Stanley’s favourite Cather novel in “Dulse” is her most perfect one: A Lost Lady [1923] [Interview, May 12, 2014; Moons 39].) Ina review of a small, sharp book on Cather, Joan Acocella’s Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (2000), A. S. Byatt—who has written some of the finest reviews of some of Munro’s books—wrote that Munro is the only other writer she knows besides Cather who “has learned to depict whole lives from a distance in the same strangely unworked-up and unaccented way, while also making it entirely new, as her landscape and moeurs are new” (53). When Cather reviewed a new edition of A Shropshire Lad in 1897, she quoted from “On your midnight pallet lying” (poem 11) and asserted: “That is what it means to write poetry; be able to say the oldest thing in the world as though it had never been said before, to make the old wounds of all bleed fresh, to give a new voice to the Weltschmerz, that, perhaps, is the most exalted lyric in the whole collection” (Cather, Review 708). So, too, with Munro. Ruth Scurr’s powerful 2011 review of Munro’s New Selected Stories (published only in Britain) is titled “The Darkness of Alice Munro.” Indeed.