4:The Munro Effect

4

 The Munro Effect

In October 2013 Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for her mastery of the contemporary short story,” which renewed my fascination for this hitherto underappreciated genre; and I made a resolution to read one Alice Munro story every week until I read them all. That’s how I discovered the secret of “the Munro effect.”

Shortly after she received the Nobel prize, I heard Shelagh Rogers interview Alice Munro on her CBC radio show The Next Chapter; and in the course of the interview Munro said something—I swear to God, it was as though the thought dropped into her mind from a higher plane like a freshly minted gem of golden wisdom—that jolted me upright: “Memoir is the facts of life. Fiction is the truth of life.”

I instantly jotted down the aphoristic wisdom of the creative genius that elevated Munro’s work from mere craft to art; but I didn’t know this until I began reading her short stories—this time with a watchful eye for what made her a grand master of the short story that garnered her the most coveted prize in literature after winning the second most coveted prize in 2009, the Man Booker International Prize, three Canadian Governor General’s awards for fiction, two Scotiabank Giller Prizes, and several others for her remarkable gift of storytelling; and it was one story in particular, the title story of her book The Love of a Good Woman, that awakened me to her secret that I came to call “the Munro effect.”

My renewed fascination for the short story re-ignited my life-long interest in another grand master of the short story, the writer who became my literary mentor from the day I discovered him in high school so many years ago, Ernest Hemingway; and once again I delved into his writing, which I do at least once a year but this time with a renewed fascination that compelled me to dig deeper into his life to better understand the man to see if I could ferret out the secret of his genius like I had unexpectedly ferreted out Alice Munroe’s.

I began my hunt for Hemingway’s secret with the last book that he wrote before taking his own life, the memoir that bared his soul and read like a last confession before his self-appointed meeting with his Maker, A Moveable Feast; and Hemingway’s last words on the world-famous writer and insensitive bastard that he had become compelled me to dig deeper until I confirmed the secret of his genius in what I came to call “the Hemingway factor” and which I realized was absolutely necessary to enhance “the Munro effect,” and by “Hemingway factor” I mean what he implied in his stories, not what he revealed; or what he referred to as the iceberg theory of writing that he discovered from Cezanne.

          So, just what do I mean by “the Munro effect” that I have now come to see characterizes all good stories? Meaning, the greater “the Munro effect” has upon a reader, the better the story will be; and by “Munro effect” I mean an act of the imagination that transforms reality into a deeper perception of what is, which Hemingway confirmed when he said that a writer must make a story “so real beyond any reality that it will become a part of the reader’s experience and a part of his memory” (Ernest Hemingway on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips, p. 5).

Alice Munro’s genius, like Ernest Hemingway’s and all great storytellers, lies in her ability to transform the naked facts of life into stories that transcend life and become art, just as another master storyteller Karen Blixen confirmed when she said: “Art is the truth above the facts of life.” But just what is this truth above the facts of life that writers ferret out with their stories? And how did “the Munro effect” put me wise to it?

 That’s today’s spiritual musing… 

There’s a mystery at the heart of the human experience, and every writer seeks to make sense of this mystery. They are magnetically drawn into the web of this mystery, and story by story they seek to unravel it; but there seems to be no end to this mystery, and writers continue to write stories year after year, decade after decade, and century after century. Some writers get so close to the mystery that they become mystical in their art.

From a very early age I wanted to be a writer, but my calling was to become a seeker first; so my best energies went into seeking an answer to the mystery of life. After years of seeking, I found the answer that I was looking for; and that’s when I wrote my first novel, What Would I Say Today If I Were to Die Tomorrow?

The shocking effect that my novel had upon the people of my hometown taught me that people fear to see the dark side of their personality, which the eminent Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung called the shadow, although they relish reading about other people. This was brought home to me again recently by a comment voiced by a friend who recognized herself in one of my books and did not like what she saw, “I don’t feel safe anymore.”

When Alice Munro was asked by Shelagh Rogers in an interview a few years before her Nobel Prize what the people of her hometown thought of her stories, she replied, “I don’t know. They don’t speak to me.” And there’s a story that the descendants of the people that the legendary humorist Stephen Leacock satirized in books like Sunset Sketches of a Little Town still harbor an abiding resentment for him; but this is true of most writers.

Hadley Richardson Mowrer, Hemingway’s first wife, said of his first novel that launched Hemingway’s career into literary stardom, “I lived through The Sun Also Rises and can remember almost the whole thing. The dialogue and situations are very true to what I recall happened” (The True Gen, Denis Brian, p. 55). Of course, the models for the people in The Sun Also Rises recognized themselves and resented Hemingway for using them in his story; but The Sun Also Rises was not memoir. It was an act of the imagination that transformed the lives of “the lost generation” in Paris and their wild and festive time in the Spanish town of Pamplona into a greater perception of their experience, thereby revealing the deeper truth of their private, secret lives; that’s why they were so angry.

Harold Loeb, who was the model for Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises, visited Hadley almost half a century after the novel’s publication and told her that he was still hurting from Hemingway’s portrait of him, and Loeb tried to set the record straight in his memoir The Way It Was; but as the literary historian Malcolm Cowley wrote in a letter to Denis Brian, “In The Sun Also Rises Ernest wasn’t even trying to be fair. But he could be satanically accurate.”  Harold Loeb was so bitter for feeling wrongly portrayed that he could never forgive Hemingway; but we aren’t all what we think we are, and that’s what writers reveal in their fictional stories.

Hemingway held the magnifying glass of his imagination upon his experience with his friends in Pamplona where they had gone to run with the bulls, and they didn’t like what they saw; that’s why they felt betrayed. But Hemingway held his magnifying glass to himself as well and revealed the dark side of his own personality; like in his short story The Sea Change, which he expanded upon in his novel The Garden of Eden. Few people made the connection between these two stories, but they both implied the dark side of Hemingway’s androgynous sex life. To a writer, no one is safe; including himself.

This is why people who recognize themselves in a writer’s fiction feel betrayed; they don’t want their secret life to be exposed. But this is how writers get to the truth of life, which can be devastating for people who think they have secret lives until they are pulled into a writer’s imagination where all bets are off—as novelist Joyce Carol Oates revealed with her portrayal of America’s beloved poet Robert Frost in her November 2013 Harper’s short story, “Lonely, Dark, Deep” which drew outrage from Frost family members and tightknit world of Frost scholars because it showed the dark side of Frost’s personality.

Over the years of her lonely self-doubting apprenticeship, Alice Munro cultivated a talent for holding the magnifying glass of her imagination to life with such artistry that we get to see a full enantiodromiac snapshot of the people she wrote about, and we always come out of her stories feeling a little wiser, a little sadder; this is what I mean by “the Munro effect.”