Nobel prize winning author stayed in my Cork home!

THERE were warm tributes and richly-deserved accolades when one of the greatest female writers of all time, Alice Munro, passed away this month.

The Canadian, who was 92, won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International Prize in a long, glittering career that influenced so many modern authors.

Oh, and she also stayed in my house in Carrigadrohid! How’s that for a claim to fame?

It was in the mid-1990s, before I lived there, may I add. Munro, who was of Irish stock, was friends with a fellow Canadian, historical writer Terry Reksten, then living in the bungalow that is now my home, in the village between Coachford and Macroom.

Reksten invited her famous friend - who was compared to the Russian writer Anton Chekhov; there is no higher praise in literary circles - over for a fortnight’s holiday, and it’s remarkable to think I am walking in the footsteps of this “master of the short story”.

Reksten died in 2001, which is when us Dolans moved in. 

I learned of our home’s connection to Munro from neighbours a few years ago, and wrote a letter to the writer, asking if we could perhaps publish one of her works in the Holly Bough, which I was then editing, and mention her time in Cork.

She never wrote back, and I now understand why; her obituaries stated she had been suffering from dementia for more than a decade.

You’re probably wondering if Munro found her writing muse while staying in a house that has lovely views of the River Lee.

Sadly not! She famously described writing as the “cycle of excitement and despair, excitement and despair”, and it seems Munro found only literary despair in Carrigadrohid.

In an academic work, Reading Alice Munro, Robert Thacker, Professor Emeritus of Canadian Studies and English at St Lawrence University in New York, says that in the fortnight the author spent in Cork, she re-wrote then rejected a short story called The Love Of A Good Woman.

“Her dissatisfaction with the story derived from changes she had made to it while she was staying in Ireland: problems to do with something she called ‘tone’,” says Prof Thacker.

Munro told him this wrong ‘tone’ “had come from Irish stories, from William Trevor and Edna O’Brien and Frank O’Connor and Mary Lavin, all of whom I had read for decades, long before I went to Ireland, and whom I was not reading during that particular time in their country.

“I was not reading them but I was seeing through them, through their eyes and their words.”

It seems Munro had unknowingly been influenced by Irish writers she enjoyed - including beloved Cork duo William Trevor and Frank O’Connor - and felt she wasn’t writing in her own authentic voice.

However, the saga had a happy ending, as when Munro left Cork and returned to Canada, she found an earlier version of The Love Of A Good Woman and it was published to great acclaim.

Munro’s works can be found in bookshops and libraries, and that particular story can be read online for free on the New Yorker website.

Although the author’s signature works were set in her native Ontario, Munro leaned heavily on her roots - she was of Wicklow stock on her mother’s side, and Scottish ancestry on her paternal line.

Interestingly, her 2006 book of short stories which explores her Scottish roots was called The View From Castle Rock - and I wonder if that title came from her stay in Cork.

The castle in Carrigadrohid, erected in the 15th century, is almost unique in having been built on a rock - one of only two such examples in Europe.

Munro’s Irish ancestors, Protestant farmers called the Chamneys and the Codes, emigrated to Ontario around 1820, and influenced her short story 1847: The Irish.

When this was made into a film for Canadian TV in 1978, Munro was bemused to discover her characters, James and Mary, a young couple with two children, had been turned from Irish Protestants to Catholics, at the insistence of the board of historians who vetted the script.

Despite her widespread fame, Munro was a modest introvert. 

“She is not a socialite. She is actually rarely seen in public, and does not go on book tours,” U.S literary critic David Homel said of her.

Her work was said to “illuminate the universal through the particular, creating stories set around Canada that appealed to readers far away”. She undoubtedly influenced generations of writers, many in Ireland.

When Munro died on May 13, author Mary Morrissy, former Lecturer in Creative Writing at UCC, told RTÉ Radio 1: “She was a writer’s writer. She dedicated her whole writing life to the short story, which is unusual, as it is usually seen as an ‘apprentice’ work - the novel being the real work.

“But her stories had the complexity of the novel. Each story was like being immersed in a novel, about the characters she was writing about; ordinary small-town folk, women in particular, who have complex lives and deal with dilemmas, desire, and thwarted ambition.”

Morrissy particularly liked My Mother’s Dream, in which the narrator relives her mother’s ordeal as a young widow in the first days of motherhood. “She saw how elastic the short story form is, and had a very serpentine way of telling the story,” added Morrissy.

This insistence by Munro on sticking to the short story form set her apart, and in 2013 she became the first Nobel recipient for literature cited exclusively for short fiction. The Academy hailed a “master of the contemporary short story” who could “accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages”.

Dublin authors Stephen Walsh, Niamh Mulvey, Tony O’Reilly and Alice Ryan all name Munro among their favourite writers, as does Cork author Danielle McLaughlin.

Kilkenny writer Tim MacGabhann said of Munro: “She breaks every single rule of the short story and gets away with it. She is magnificent.”

Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, was a great friend of her fellow Canadian, as well as a huge fan of Munro’s work.

Selected Stories by Munro (1996) appeared in a 2018 list of the top 100 essential books written by women, and acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar based his 2016 film Julieta on three short stories by her - Chance, Silence, and Soon, from her 2004 book Runaway.

Away From Her, a 2006 Oscar-nominated Canadian drama starring Julie Christie, was based on Munro’s short story The Bear Came Over The Mountain.

In a 2012 review of Dear Life, which turned out to be the ailing Munro’s final book, Cork author Billy O’Callaghan called her “astonishing ... a writer whose mastery of the craft has reached such a level that her nickname, ‘Canada’s Chekhov’, feels emptied of all hyperbole.

“Munro’s characters seem to exist on the brink of some chasm, hunched with regret at chances not taken, braced to survive and embrace the present, and stirred and cowered by what might lie ahead, forcing them to acknowledge something of who they really are,” said O’Callaghan.

Like many writers, Munro had experienced personal tragedy; one of her three daughters died when a day old in 1955. She decided to be a writer at age 11 - “I didn’t have any other talents,” she said. “I’m not really an intellectual. I was an OK housewife, but I wasn’t that great.”

She once said of her work: “I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way - what happens to somebody - but I want that ‘what happens’ to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turn-arounds, and strangeness. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing - not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens.”

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.