Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
by Alice Munro (2001)
Vintage (2004)
323 pp
It’s time for Betsy and me to move on to Munro’s tenth book, 2001’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. We will soon be posting our thoughts on the first story, and I wanted to get this index post up so that any of you who are interested in joining us can get the book and get started. We had a bit of a head start on this one; after Munro won the Nobel Prize the New Yorker reprinted “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” and Betsy and I talked about it at the time, so you can read our thoughts on that great story already.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is a collection of nine stories. This is the anchor post, an index with links to our posts on each story in the collection.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage contains the following stories:
I look forward to the discussion.
Also I’m still not sure how this website works. So I’m also adding this comment here just so I get an email notification if anyone else leaves a comment here.
For the same reason I’m going to leave an initial brief comment on the ‘The Bear Came Over The Mountain’ thread.
A year ago “The Bear Came Over The Mountain” was a contestant in Mookse Madness. During the competition I wrote a number of comments about it during the various rounds of voting. I didn’t remember those discussions so I just went back and read them over for the first time in over a year. I’m going to copy one of them here because it fits in quite nicely with some things I was saying recently in the discussion of “Before The Change”. Here is me talking about “The Bear Came Over The Mountain” from March 24, 2018:
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One of the problems with “The Bear Came Over The Mountain” that seems to be growing is revealed as I read other interpretations of the story. Is Grant taking care of Fiona now out of some sort of penance for his past infidelity? Some think so. Is it something he does to perhaps justify his past? Others think this. Is he just a cad who feels no guilt and no need to justify his past and just happens to also try to take care of Fiona? I’ve heard this too. And yet none of those are what I thought the story was about. So in a further reading I looked for the clues Munro might have dropped as to which is the best reading of the story and find that for the most part there is not a lot there. It makes me wonder if she has just cleverly tricked us by putting up a mirror and made us think she painted a portrait.
Ambiguity can be good in a story, but it needs to serve some other purpose other than “you figure it out” or “stories can go many ways and I wanted this one to go in all of them”. I don’t see a purpose for ambiguity here that would justify it so the fact that so many people fundamentally disagree about the nature of the main character makes me wonder if this is a fault of the writing. I do still think I can make the best case for the version of Grant I thought he was on my first reading, but even to make that case I have to refer to how I think Munro would have thought in approaching the story, which is to say it’s not really all in the story itself.
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I voted for Munro’s story in the first three rounds of Mookse Madness, but after that I voted for its opponent, first, as it beat out Elizabeth Taylor’s “A Dedicated Man” and then as it lost in the final to Jean Rhys’ “La Grosse Fifi”.
Alice Quinn, since 1996 Alice Munro´s “The New Yorker” editor, interviewed her in Feb 19, 2001 issue , when the story “What is remembered”. later included in “Hateship, Friendship…”, was published.
To Quinn´s question ‘Does your idea of the kind of story you want to write change?’ she answered ‘Yes it does’. She went on to explain that she would do some things differently from her earlier years, alter a phrase that seems too polished or too sharp or too smart-aleck or ironic.
Then she kind of compares her 90´s collections “Open Secrets” and “The Love of a Good Woman” to “Hateship, Friedship..” to be published later in 2001.
“And I notice with these latest stories that my idea seems to have become simpler. And more scaled down. For a while, my stories were opening to such a complexity. And I could not do anything about it. That was the only way I could find to tell them”.
David, for what it’s worth, when I read ‘The Bear…’ some years ago, I noted to myself that it was a ‘warm story and kind of non-judgmental about Grant’s affairs’.
I think ambiguity is all part of Munro’s magic. Ambiguity – in the sense of leaving things open to interpretation, of not spelling everything out – is, after all, part of how an author flatters his/her readers. Ha ha.
In discussing matters of interpretation I think one always has to go back to the text, and discuss specifics of the text.
Harri, that’s an interesting trailer from Munro. In comparison with, say, the ‘The Love Of A Good Woman’ story, I think ‘The Bear…’ bears out what Munro is saying. I’ll be interested to see if the other stories do also.
Howard,
“leaving things open to interpretation, of not spelling everything out – is, after all, part of how an author flatters his/her readers.”
To me, this marks one line that separates a literary writer from a popular writer. Literary authors are not seeking to flatter their audience and furthermore, they have a point of view, something to say, that is antithetical to leaving things open for the audience to fill in the blanks however they like. In my comments on the story “H,F,C,L,M” I have noted a couple of examples of ambiguity or open endedness that serves a purpose and where the reader is not being invited to fill in what is missing. That’s something literary writers sometimes do and she does extremely well there. Which is why I look in her other stories for either a single clear interpretation (even if it is difficult to root out) or an open endedness that is intended to stay open ended (and makes the story better for not being resolved). I just don’t see Munro thinking that she wants to leave things vague and open to please the reader who wants to play co-author. She’s better than that.
David, I think literary writers are probably more prone to trying to flatter their readers than popular writers are. Why? Because the more literary a writer is, the more they’re playing status games with their readers – rather than playing commercial popularity games.
As I see it, this is nothing to do with having a stab at being, as it were, a co-author.
If I’ve worked my fingers to the bone solving Munro’s omissions, with the result that, as I see it, I’ve successfully deciphered her story, I distinctly feel her stroking what remains of my hair and hear her congratulating me. (I’d love to think I’m the only one honoured to receive such treatment but have this sneaking suspicion I’m not. Ha ha.)
I find her short stories egg me on: “c’mon, you’re a sophisticated a reader, aren’t you?” And most of the time she does this without being overtly experimental, intellectual or literary. Utterly remarkable.
I suppose underpinning what I’m trying to get at is, why do creators create ‘challenging’ works? To boldly go etc etc …? The cynic in me can’t swallow that.
Howard, I don’t think we could disagree more on this one! Here are a couple of more thoughts about this. First, it sounds to me like you have the cart before the horse. A person is not a literary writer first and then we look and see what things they do in their writing. It is only after looking at the writing that we can tell if the person is a literary writer or not. The kinds of things that tend to go along with being a literary writer is having a strong internal motivation. They are people who have something to say or a unique point of view or a unique style of expression. Often with a literary writer we are surprised by the things they create and the way they create because it is unique, special, and a true expression of an artistic vision. The literary writer looks for what they have to say, even if no one is listening. The popular writer asks what people want to hear and then seeks to give it to them.
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Second, In the battles that authors have with editors and publishers, it often comes down to the latter pushing for things that will be more popular with readers, that will sell well. You gotta have a happy ending – people like happy endings. You gotta have a love story in there – people love love stories. Literary writers have to push back against this and fight for what their work *is*, not what others want it to be.
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So if there are seeming ambiguities or aspects of a story that are difficult to resolve, it is the popular writer who thinks “readers love a mystery, so I’ll give them one” or “readers like to re-write endings all the time, so I’ll give them an open-ended one they can just finish however they like”. Literary writers say, “that’s just how this story goes. And if that means it is complex or, at times, seems to be ambiguous, then that’s just how it goes.”