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ABSTRACT
This article begins by revisiting a conversation I had with Alice Munro in 1987 in which she named her favorite story by Willa Cather, “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932). After that conversation I went on to analyze Cather’s influence on Munro in her own story, “Dulse” (1980)—where Cather is in effect a character—in my article “Alice Munro’s Willa Cather” (1992). But until now I have not pursued the structural symmetry mentioned in passing there between “Old Mrs. Harris” and Munro’s “The Progress of Love” (1985), the title story of her sixth collection. This article does that, treating the three women in each story—grandmother, daughter, granddaughter—through both their autobiographical underpinnings and the narrative wisdom each story ultimately yields. This comparison is an instance of direct influence, of one great writer modeling for another.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to my friend and Munro colleague J. R. (Tim) Struthers (University of Guelph) for his encouragements to return to the subject treated here.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Beyond relevant correspondence, the Alice Munro Fonds in Calgary hold production materials which confirm the provenance I am detailing here. The New Yorker proof just cited—dated 22 January 1985, one that sets the text in machine-generated columns of the size the magazine uses—is 58 pages long and has Munro’s autograph corrections throughout which shift the submitted first-person text to the third person.
2. A good example of what I am describing here is “The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry” (Munro Citation1982a), a story Munro published in Grand Street but, despite considerable revisions to it over the years, never included it in a collection. She was still thinking about it in April 2004 when, during an interview, she asked me what I thought the story was about. She said that she had rewritten it in 2003, commenting that “it still doesn’t work” and that “it will never see the light of day,” explaining that “it has a lot in it that I want to say, but I think when I started writing that I was on the verge of writing complicated stories that came later, and I hadn’t quite grasped how to do it” (Thacker Citation2004).
3. Munro visited Grand Manan herself during the late 1970s and there met a person who served as prototype for Mr. Stanley. Other people did too. In November 1993, scholar David Stouck (Simon Fraser University) wrote to me as I was planning my first trip there, saying “I went there 17 years ago (indeed the man Munro describes in ‘Dulse’ was there at the Cather shrine)” (personal collection). This “shrine” was the Lewis-Cather cottage at Whale Cove, Grand Manan—the property was owned in Edith Lewis’s name.
4. When Bob Marks responds here by saying “‘Money’s always the point’” there is another echo from Cather’s work, although given the attitudes in the culture Munro is writing about in her story the reference may be coincidental. In The Professor’s House (Citation1998 [1925]), Cather’s most philosophical novel, she has two characters differing on what should have been done with the relics they had found on the Blue Mesa—actually Mesa Verde in Colorado—the one saying “that it would come to money in the end. ‘Everything does,’ he added” (243). And when she is describing her family house while the commune was in it, Phemie maintains that she would rather see “the farm suffer outright neglect … than see that rainbow on the barn, and some letters that looked Egyptian painted on the wall of the house” (Munro Citation1986, 24). While there is no clear connection to Cather here, after Lewis and Cather stopped coming to Grand Manan because of war-connected activities in the region—they were last there during the summer of 1940—their cottage was left to decay (see Thacker Citation2016, 278 n7).