This tension has remained with her: as in “The Moons of Jupiter,” Munro’s artistic characters are punished for not succeeding, but they are punished also for success. The woman writer, thinking about her father, says:

  I could hear him saying, Well, I didn’t see anything about you in Maclean’s. And if he had read something about me he would say, Well, I didn’t think too much of that writeup. His tone would be humorous and indulgent but would produce in me a familiar dreariness of spirit. The message I got from him was simple: Fame must be striven for, then apologized for. Getting or not getting it, you will be to blame.

  * * *

  —

  “Dreariness of spirit” is one of the great Munro enemies. Her characters do battle with it in every way they can, fighting against stifling mores and other people’s deadening expectations and imposed rules of behaviour, and every possible kind of muffling and spiritual smothering. Given a choice between being a person who does good works but has inauthentic feelings and is numb at heart and one who behaves badly but is true to what she really feels and is thus alive to herself, a Munro woman is likely to choose the latter; or, if she chooses the former, she will then comment on her own slipperiness, guile, wiliness, slyness, and perversity. Honesty, in Munro’s work, is not the best policy: it is not a policy at all, but an essential element, like air. The characters must get hold of at least some of it, by means fair or foul, or—they feel—they will go under.

  The battle for authenticity is waged most significantly in the field of sex. The Munro social world—like most societies in which silence and secrecy are the norm in sexual matters—carries a high erotic charge, and this charge extends like a neon penumbra around each character, illuminating landscapes, rooms, and objects. A rumpled bed says more, in the hands of Munro, than any graphic in-out, in-out depiction of genitalia ever could. Even if a story is not primarily about a love affair or sexual encounter, men and women are always aware of one another as men and women, positively or negatively, recognizing sexual attraction and curiosity or else sexual revulsion. Women are immediately attuned to the sexual power of other women, and are wary of it, or envious. Men show off and preen and flirt and seduce and compete.

  Munro’s characters are as alert as dogs in a perfume store to the sexual chemistry in a gathering—the chemistry among others, as well as their own visceral responses. Falling in love, falling in lust, sneaking around on spouses and enjoying it, telling sexual lies, doing shameful things they feel compelled to do out of irresistible desire, making sexual calculations based on social desperation—few writers have explored such processes more thoroughly, and more ruthlessly. Pushing the sexual boundaries is distinctly thrilling for many a Munro woman; but in order to trespass you have to know exactly where the fence is, and Munro’s universe is criss-crossed with meticulously defined boundaries. Hands, chairs, glances—all are part of an intricate inner map strewn with barbed wire and booby traps, and secret paths through the shrubbery.

  For women of Munro’s generation, sexual expression was a liberation and a way out. But out of what? Out of the denial and limiting scorn she describes so well in “The Turkey Season”:

  Lily said she never let her husband come near her if he had been drinking. Marjorie said since the time she nearly died with a hemorrhage she never let her husband come near her, period. Lily said quickly that it was only when he’d been drinking that he tried anything. I could see that it was a matter of pride not to let your husband come near you, but I couldn’t quite believe that “come near” meant “have sex.”

  For older women like Lily and Marjorie, to enjoy sex would have been a humiliating defeat. For women like Rose, in “The Beggar Maid,” it’s a matter for pride and celebration, a victory. For later generations of women—post–sexual revolution—enjoying sex was to become simply a duty, the perfect orgasm yet another thing to add to their list of required accomplishments; and when enjoyment becomes a duty, we’re back in the land of “dreariness of spirit.” But for a Munro character in the throes of sexual exploration, the spirit may be confused and ashamed and tormented, even cruel and sadistic—some of the couples in her stories get pleasure out of torturing each other emotionally, just like some real people—but it is never dreary.

  In some of the later stories, sex can be less impetuous, more calculated: for Grant, in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” it’s the decisive element in an astonishing feat of emotional commodities-trading. His beloved wife, Fiona, has dementia, and has become attached to a similarly afflicted man in her care facility. When this man is taken home by his hard-bitten, practical wife, Marian, Fiona pines and stops eating. Grant wants to persuade Marian to put her husband back in the institution. Marian refuses: it would cost too much. But Grant detects that Marian is lonely and sexually available. She has a wrinkled-up face, but her body is still attractive. Like an adroit salesman, Grant moves in to close the deal. Munro knows full well that sex can be a glory and a torment, but it can also be a bargaining chip.

  * * *

  —

  The society Munro writes about is a Christian one. This Christianity is not often overt; it’s merely the general background. Flo in “The Beggar Maid” decorates the walls with “a number of admonitions, pious and cheerful and mildly bawdy”:

  THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD

  BELIEVE IN THE LORD JESUS CHRIST AND THOU SHALT BE SAVED

  Why did Flo have those, when she wasn’t even religious? They were what people had, common as calendars.

  Christianity is “what people had”—and in Canada, church and state were never separated along the lines laid down in the United States. Prayers and Bible readings were daily fare in publicly funded schools. This cultural Christianity has provided ample material for Munro, but it is also connected with one of the most distinctive patterns in her image-making and storytelling.

  The central Christian tenet is that two disparate and mutually exclusive elements—divinity and humanity—got jammed together in Christ, neither annihilating the other. The result was not a demi-god, or a god in disguise: God became totally a human being while remaining at the same time totally divine. To believe that Christ was only a man or to believe he was simply God were both declared heretical by the early Christian Church. Christianity thus depends on a denial of either/or classifying logic and an acceptance of both-at-once mystery. Logic says that A cannot be both itself and non-A at the same time, Christianity says it can. The formulation “A but also non-A” is indispensable to it.

  Many of Munro’s stories resolve themselves—or fail to resolve themselves—in precisely this way. The example that first came to mind—though there are many—is from Lives of Girls and Women, in which the teacher who’d staged the high school’s airy and joyful operettas drowns herself in the river.

  Miss Farris in her velvet skating costume…Miss Farris con brio…Miss Farris floating face down, unprotesting, in the Wawanash River, six days before she was found. Though there is no plausible way of hanging those pictures together—if the last one is true then might it not alter all the others?—they are going to have to stay together now.

  For Munro, a thing can be true, but not true, but true nonetheless. “It is real and dishonest,” thinks Georgia of her remorse in “Differently.” “How hard it is for me to believe that I made that up,” says the narrator of “The Progress of Love.” “It seems so much the truth it is the truth; it’s what I believe about them. I haven’t stopped believing it.” The world is profane and sacred. It must be swallowed whole. There’s always more to be known about it than you can ever know.

  * * *

  —

  In a story called “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You,” jealous Et describes her sister’s former lover—a promiscuous ladies’ man—and the look he gives to every woman, a look “that made him seem to be a deep-sea diver diving down, down through all the emptiness and cold and wreckage to discover the one thing he had set his heart on, something small and precious, hard to locate, as a ruby maybe on the ocean floor.”

  Munro’s stories abound in such questionable seekers and well-fingered ploys. But they abound also in such insights: within any story, within any human being, there may be a dangerous treasure, a priceless ruby. A heart’s desire.

  Ancient Balances

  (2008)

  Canadian nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton had an odd bill presented to him on his twenty-first birthday. It was a record kept by his father of all the expenses connected with young Ernest’s childhood and youth, including the fee charged by the doctor for delivering him. Even more oddly, Ernest is said to have paid it. I used to think that Mr. Seton Senior was a jerk, but now I’m wondering, What if he was—in principle—right? Are we in debt to anyone or anything for the bare fact of our existence? If so, what do we owe, and to whom or to what? And how should we pay?

  * * *

  —

  When I was asked to give the 2008 Massey Lectures, I decided to use them to explore a subject I know little about, but which for this reason intrigues me. That subject is debt.

  Not debt management, or sleep debt, or the national debt, or about managing your monthly budget, or about how debt is actually a good thing because you can borrow money and then make it grow, or about shopaholics and how to figure out that you are one: bookstores and the Internet abound in such materials.

  Nor the more lurid forms of debt: gambling debts and Mafia revenges, karmic justice whereby bad deeds trigger reincarnation as a beetle, or melodramas in which moustache-twirling creditors use non-payment of the rent to force unwanted sex on beautiful women, though it may touch on these. Instead, it’s about debt as a human construct—thus an imaginative construct—and how this construct mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear.

  Writers write about what worries them, says Alistair MacLeod. Also about what puzzles them, I’d add. This subject is one of the most worrisome and puzzling things I know: that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.

  * * *

  —

  The things that puzzle us as adults begin by puzzling us as children, or this has certainly been the case for me. In the late 1940s society in which I grew up, there were three things you were never supposed to ask questions about. One of them was money, especially how much of it anyone made. The second was religion: to begin a conversation on that subject would lead directly to the Spanish Inquisition, or worse. The third was sex. I lived among biologists, and sex—at least as practised by insects—was something I could look up in the textbooks that were lying around the house: the ovipositor was no stranger to me. So the burning curiosity children experience vis-à-vis the forbidden was focused, for me, on the two other taboo areas: the financial and the devotional.

  At first these appeared to be distinct categories. There were the things of God, which were unseen. Then there were the things of Caesar, which were all too material. They took the form of golden calves, of which we didn’t have many in Toronto at that time, and also the form of money, the love of which was the root of all evil. But on the other hand stood the comic-book character Scrooge McDuck—much read about by me—who was a hot-tempered, tight-fisted, and often devious billionaire named after Charles Dickens’s famous redeemed miser, Ebenezer Scrooge. The plutocratic McDuck had a large money bin full of gold coins, in which he and his three adopted nephews splashed around as if in a swimming pool. Money, for Uncle Scrooge and the young duck triplets, was not the root of all evil but a pleasurable plaything. Which of these views was correct?

  We kids of the 1940s did usually have some pocket money, and although we weren’t supposed to talk about it or have an undue love of it, we were expected to learn to manage it at an early age. When I was eight years old, I had my first paying job. I was already acquainted with money in a more limited way—I got five cents a week as an allowance, which bought a lot more tooth decay then than it does now. The pennies not spent on candy I kept in a tin box that had once held Lipton tea. It had a brightly coloured Indian design, complete with elephant, opulent veiled lady, men in turbans, temples and domes, palm trees, and a sky so blue it never was. The pennies had leaves on one side and king’s heads on the other, and were desirable to me according to their rarity and beauty: King George VI, the reigning monarch, was common currency and thus low-ranking on my snobby little scale, and also he had no beard or moustache; but there were still some hairier George Vs in circulation, and, if you were lucky, a really fur-faced Edward VII or two.

  I understood that these pennies could be traded for goods such as ice-cream cones, but I did not think them superior to the other units of currency used by my fellow children: cigarette-package airplane cards, milk-bottle tops, comic books, and glass marbles of many kinds. Within each of these categories, the principle was the same: rarity and beauty increased value. The rate of exchange was set by the children themselves, though a good deal of haggling took place.

  All of that changed when I got a job. The job paid twenty-five cents an hour—a fortune!—and consisted of wheeling a baby around in the snow. As long as I brought the baby back, alive and not too frozen, I got the twenty-five cents. It was at this time in my life that each penny came to be worth the same as every other penny, despite whose head was on it, thus teaching me an important lesson: in high finance, aesthetic considerations soon drop by the wayside, worse luck.

  Since I was making so much money, I was told I needed a bank account, so I graduated from the Lipton tea tin and acquired a red bank book. Now the difference between the pennies with heads on them and the marbles, milk-bottle tops, comic books, and airplane cards became clear because you could not put the marbles into the bank. But you were urged to put your money in there, in order to keep it safe. When I’d accumulated a dangerous amount of the stuff—say, a dollar—I would deposit it at the bank, where the sum was recorded in pen and ink by an intimidating bank teller. The last number in the series was called “the balance”—not a term I understood, as I had yet to see a two-armed weighing scales.

  Every once in a while an extra sum would appear in my red bank book—one I hadn’t deposited. This, I was told, was called “interest,” and I had “earned” it by having kept my money in the bank. I didn’t understand this either. It was certainly interesting to me that I had some extra money—that must be why it was called “interest”—but I knew I hadn’t actually earned it: no babies from the bank had been wheeled around in the snow by me. Where then had these mysterious sums come from? Surely from the same imaginary place that spawned the nickels left by the Tooth Fairy in exchange for your shucked-off teeth: some realm of pious invention that couldn’t be located anywhere exactly, but that we all had to pretend to believe in or the tooth-for-a-nickel gambit would no longer work.

  However, the nickels under the pillow were real enough. So was the bank interest because you could cash it in and turn it back into pennies, and thence into candy and ice-cream cones. But how could a fiction generate real objects? I knew from fairy tales such as Peter Pan that if you ceased to believe in fairies they would drop dead: if I stopped believing in banks, would they too expire? The adult view was that fairies were unreal and banks were real. But was that true?

  Thus began my financial puzzlements. Nor are they over yet.

  * * *

  —

  During the past half-century I’ve spent much time riding around on public transport. I always read the ads. In the 1950s, there were a lot of girdle and brassiere ads, and ads for deodorants and mouthwashes. Today these have vanished, to be replaced by ads for diseases—heart problems, arthritis, diabetes, and more; ads to help you stop smoking; ads for television series that always feature a goddess-like woman or two, though these are sometimes ads for hair dye and skin cream; and ads for agencies you can call if you have a gambling addiction. And ads for debt services—there are a lot of this kind.

  One of them shows a gleefully smiling woman with a young child. The caption says, “Now I’m in charge…and the collection calls have stopped.” “Like hell money doesn’t buy happiness—debt is manageable,” says another. “There is Life after Debt!” punningly chirps a third. “There can be a happily ever after part!” trills a fourth, catering to the same belief in fairy tales that inspired you to shove the bills under the rug and then make believe they’d been paid. “Is someone on your tail?” queries a fifth ad, more ominously, from the back end of a bus. These services promise not to make your burdensome debts vanish in a puff of smoke but to help you to consolidate them and pay them down in bits and pieces, while learning to avoid the free-spending behaviour that got you so deeply into the red in the first place.

  Why are there so many of these ads? Is it because there are unprecedented numbers of people in debt? Very possibly.