All his life—he had difficulty saying this, as he admitted, being always wary of too much enthusiasm—all his life he had been waiting for such a student to come into this room. A student who would challenge him completely, who was not only capable of following the strivings of his own mind but perhaps of flying beyond them. He had to be careful about saying what he really believed—that there must be something like intuition in a first-rate mathematician’s mind, some lightning flare to uncover what has been there all along. Rigorous, meticulous, one must be, but so must the great poet.

When he finally brought himself to say all this to Sophia, he also said that there were those who would bridle at the very word, “poet,” in connection with mathematical science. And others, he said, who would leap at the notion all too readily, to defend a muddle and laxity in their own thinking.

—Excerpt from Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

On the Probability of Happiness

…………………………………

Alice Munro

The title story in Alice Munro’s most recent collection, Too Much Happiness, is based on the story of the late 19th-Century Russian mathematician and novelist, Sophia Kovalevsky. TNQ editor Kim Jernigan and Arc editor Anita Lahey met with Munro at Bailey’s restaurant in Goderich, Ontario in December, 2010, to discuss her fascination with Sophia’s dual gifts; how to pilfer mathematics for metaphor; where science, superstition and emotion may meet in a brilliant mind; the complications of family, romance, Russian politics, and social mores in Sophia’s life; and what it means to be “too happy.”

Alice Munro: This story happened almost by accident. I was looking through the encyclopedia for something else when I saw Sophia’s name at the top of the page. It said she was both a mathematician and a novelist, and I thought, ‘No! It doesn’t happen.’ [Laughs.] So then I began to find out everything I could about her, and it was so wonderful, so terribly interesting.

Anita Lahey: Did you really think it was that surprising that the two abilities could come together in the same person?

AM: Yes I did. And that’s probably very ill-informed on my part. But I have a brother who’s a scientist and in our family it’s Bill who’s got brains—and then there’s Alice. [Laughter.] So I was interested in the question of how she could do both. I found this wonderful book: Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky, by Don Kennedy and his wife Nina, who has an ancestral connection to Sophia; there’s a note about that following my story. Most of my factual material came from there. I was just so lucky to find it. And then, I have a friend—well we’ve never met—but I have a friend in Russia. She was sending me cries of astonishment: ‘You know Sophia? Sophia is our heroine. All the kids in school learn about her.’ This would have been in the time of the Soviet Union when my friend was at school, so Sophia had gotten a lot of press. I don’t know though what Russians think of my book—I call it a book because to me it almost feels that way—it was that much work.

Kim Jernigan: And it feels that rich.

AM: Yes, the story covers a lot of ground.

AL: It felt like a departure for you to be writing about an historical figure.

AM: It was very exciting. I really wanted to do it. But it was harder.

KJ: You begin at a juncture where there’s so much promise in Sophia’s life—of love, of a new career—and then everything falls apart. But as you go back in time, we see the roots of the dissolution—

AM: I can remember writing that with terrific emotion because it was really what happened.

AL: As you started to read about Kovalevsky, what did you discover about this coming together of the two kinds of minds?

AM: At first I read about her childhood, mostly about this terrifically beautiful, self-dramatized, marvellous sister of hers who kept the household in absolute turmoil with the things she would do, and the things she threatened to do. And then there was all this stuff about women not being allowed to leave Russia unless accompanied by a male relative.

KJ: She couldn’t even walk in the street by herself.

AM: Oh no. But that would have been true of walking in the streets of London at that time too, I think, at least for a woman of a certain class. Anyway, Sophia is just a little hanger-on to the wonderful, glamorous sister until, as in the story, she picks up a book that had been left for her father to read, because he was a general, and artillery I understand is mathematical—and as soon as she saw it, she understood it. Not all, but she started putting it together. I found this so fascinating. What is the mathematical mind like? I don’t really know, even now.

KJ: They say that mathematical genius manifests very young.

AM: Is that right?

KJ: Engineers make their best discoveries in their 40s and 50s, but mathematicians make their best discoveries in their late 20s, or so my husband (who’s an engineer) tells me.

AM: So maybe she didn’t lose so much professionally by dying young. I think she lost possibly a lot of happiness. But the mathematics—

AL: Did you come to understand any of that math?

AM: As far as I needed to, yes. But I found I was veering toward the emotional side. You know, to how her professional aspirations affected her emotional life—and I understood the math to a lesser degree. I did go to high school. I was doing fine in math, until about three quarters of the way through grade 12. I went away to have my appendix out, and when I came back, I’d missed something. And that was the end of it.

KJ: Sophia’s work has to do with differential equations. I didn’t get much farther in math than you did, but I’m told they have to do with mathematically modelling the way systems change over time and distance. I think that notion is very rich metaphorically—

AM: It is! Immediately—and I feel almost embarrassed by this—I was jumping into the metaphors. Which, you know, a real scientist would never do. But I think she might have. It was the double-framing for her that fascinated me, because she wasn’t fooling around with either the writing or the math. And then I just loved the whole business about how she had to get married to this guy so she could leave Russia.

KJ: And yet he kind of hung around in her life.

AM: Oh yeah, he loved her.

KJ: How old would she have been?

AM: Oh, she might have been 16, 17. Really a little girl. He’s the sacrifice. A terrible sacrifice. Because he was so bright too. He’s still remembered as a paleontologist. He would have been, perhaps, with an ideal wife—you know, I was brought up, well, to be a farm wife and that’s different. But when I was a young married woman, I learned that educated women wanted desperately to worship and follow and give help to a man. It was not the uneducated who wanted this. It was the girls who read Freud. I didn’t know any girls like that until I went to Vancouver. When I met them, I discovered I was barking up the wrong tree entirely, that other women didn’t want to do the things I wanted to do. In the writing community it was like that too. It was women who were difficult for me to deal with. They didn’t approve of me, because they sensed that I wanted something of my own.

I’ve done a bit of reading about this recently, and apparently there was a great Freudian burst before the Second World War, but then women had to go and help with the war, so it got all confused. But right after the war, when the heroes came home and we started having babies to get the population up again, it was very strong. I remember the men at university. I was at the University of Western Ontario for two years. I was a waitress in the cafeteria, to help pay my way. At the table where the men sat, they had terrific intellectual arguments (my present husband was one of those intellectuals): you could hear them all over the cafeteria, and it was so interesting. Maybe a couple of wives sat there too, but they never said anything. And they were doing the right thing. I came from a small town where nobody went to university and nobody cared about these things, so I hadn’t heard about Freud and I hadn’t heard about what I now should be feeling as a woman. But when I got to live in the suburbs, I found out, and it was a total surprise to me, that female achievement was so out of style. I had grown up so outside any respectable society—a farm is respectable, but it’s different—that I had ambitions I wouldn’t have had had I been better educated.

AL: I’m surprised the women would just accept Freud’s—

AM: One thing I’ve learned is that people accept fashions very readily, and intellectual women or men are not immune to this either. The 60s was when I finally began to feel alive, though I was really too old.

AL: Did you feel a connection to Sophia because of that, that maybe she was a little more your kind of woman?

AM: Oh yes. Of course. Why does Maxsim give up on her? Why does he go home? Because she got the prize. And this really happened. And he was a very intelligent, sophisticated man—

KJ: Jealousy?

AM: Well, yes. Suddenly, he’s not unusual. There are lots of brilliant men around. And there she is, getting the attention because, as a woman mathematician, she’s a freak. And she’s getting this prize. So he goes home and starts writing these sulky letters about how he’s got this other woman living with him, and he can’t introduce Sophia. [Pause] What interested me really was that she’s part of the old world, part of the wanting to be looked after, yet also wanting to be herself. I don’t know if it’s a problem anymore but it’s something I could relate to.

KJ: I think it’s perennial. And it’s so interestingly developed in this story. The sense of Sophia as a child having a father she could lean into. That’s kind of what she’s yearning towards in Maxsim too. But at the same time she wants to have an independent life, an intellectual life that’s her own.

AM: She wants it all.

KJ: She wants somebody to take care of her so that she can pursue her work.

AM: That’s true too.

KJ: Her professor and mentor—he was about ideas, the life of the mind, not about fame and fortune—but he had the two sisters who cared for him and allowed him to live that life. I thought maybe that was an attractive model for her.

AM: Well, if she could be in his position. But also, she would want the sexual love, which was out of the picture—I thought that was fascinating. There was the great brain in the study, and there were the two sisters, who weren’t dummies. Practically adept, but they also read. On Sundays they read novels aloud. They knew about love. But not for them.

AL: Yes. I loved the ritual of that.

KJ: The professor makes a comparison between poetry and mathematics, the combination of intuition and rigour required for each. On the way here, we were talking about mathematics and how it might work as metaphor, differential equations as a kind of decision-making mechanism in situations where there’s conflict or uncertainty, but I’m told mathematics isn’t about decision making, it’s about description. It might help her understand a situation but not resolve it.

AM: Actually, I didn’t think very deeply about the theories. What I thought about was the woman with a gift, it could be any gift. Though some gifts are easier than others to embrace. And mathematics I thought was not an easy one. And her excitement about it, which couldn’t be held back.

AL: Were you able to read any of her books?

AM: Yes. I read some of her fiction. I think she was very good. The fiction I really liked was about her childhood, about growing up on the farm. You know, the beauty—you get this from Russian writers, the beauty of Russia. Then I read something she’d written for political purposes, and I didn’t like it. I had the feeling she didn’t either, but she felt obliged to write it. The story was about a man who was a political dissident being exiled to Siberia. He would get better treatment if he had a wife, so this young woman said, I will be your wife. Never mind that I don’t particularly like you.

AL: I remember that Sophia was more fond of the personal novel herself, but she wrote this one because she felt—

AM: It was a good thing to do. I think Russians in that period really did feel that kind of duty. There was a desperation to do something about their country. Maxsim did go home to Russia to teach. He was trying to form a party based on a parliamentary democracy with a king at the head, but of course nobody went for that. And Lenin did denounce him. After Lenin denounced him I don’t know what happened to him. I’ve lost Maxsim and I haven’t found anything more about him. Of course I don’t know where to look. But I think that’s interesting, that he could go back and it would seem like it was possible to work something out, that Russia could survive without suffering the horrors it did survive.

AL: There’s an interesting thing in the story where you get the sense that her mentor, the older professor, is flabbergasted that she would bother to write a novel.

AM: Yes. Yes. Yes. He’s just at sea in the whole world of fiction. That interested me.

AL: Also, the idea of her letting him down. Where did that come from?

AM: After she’d been his prize pupil and got her advanced degree, she puts it in her bag, she goes home, and suddenly everything is beautiful. It’s summer in Petersburg, and everybody’s having a wonderful time, and she wonders, what is this all about? And she doesn’t write to him. He writes to her. He tries to keep her interested in mathematics. Sometimes she doesn’t even answer. All the pleasures of coasting along in life really get to her. She does it for about four or five years. She has a baby. She wasn’t having any of that earlier. And she doesn’t respond to her old teacher, hardly at all. Which I found very hard—I could understand it though. I put a line in the book about that, you know, that there are lots of people who can get through life very comfortably without any major interest, without any devotion to anything. And she was just discovering this.

AL: Do you think she was having a good time?

AM: Yeah. All you have to do is decide it’s worth-while to have a good time and you can thrive in life. Everybody else seemed to know this but she was just learning it. But then of course the money problem got her interested again.

AL: Do you think she would have gone back if not for the money?

AM: I think so, but needing the money was a great impetus. They lost their money and her husband had a kind of nervous breakdown. And even then she wrote science stuff for the newspaper; she reviewed plays. All these things to make money rather than go back and commit herself. But when she had to, she went back. And then it was as if she’d never been away.

KJ: I’m interested in the structure of the story. At what point did you decide to start towards the end of her life and work backwards?

AM: I think because of that picture of them in the graveyard on the first day of the year. The rest of the story came from there. She’s already hoping that she can have a normal life and be a scientist.

KJ: And yet the setting is so ominous! In another of the pieces in this gathering, poet Matthew Tierney writes about the poem as time machine. Writers can be very free with how they move about in time. I’ve always been fascinated with that aspect of your work, how much the way you arrange things temporally affects the experience of the reader. The first of your stories that really made me think about this was “Miles City, Montana,” from The Progress of Love.

AM: Oh yes.

KJ: I read that when my two daughters were exactly the same age as the children in the story.

AM: Oh god.

KJ: A young boy has drowned, and there’s all kind of drama about it. And then the story leaps forward, to when the family is on a road trip going from west to east through the States. It’s a hot, hot summer, and the kids are cranky in the back seat so they stop at a pool they spot. It’s closed, but they see the lifeguard and they say, can we let the children in to swim and cool off, and he’s persuaded. Then the father’s going out to the car to do whatever fathers do [laughter], and the mother’s walking through the park. Suddenly the boy who drowned at the beginning of the story—I had completely forgotten about him as I was drawn into the car trip—came back into my head. At that exact same moment in the story, the mother has a premonition that she has to get back to the pool. So she goes racing back and the lifeguard has a girlfriend and is flirting and not paying attention, and the youngest daughter is on the bottom of the pool. The mother calls to the father who leaps the fence. They rescue the child and there’s this great rush of relief and a sense of jubilation, of the mother and father having come together, and then you add, “That was before the divorce.” And oh, it was heartbreaking but brilliant. Reading Sophia’s story, a true story, I was thinking a lot about the way you positioned the narrative elements.

AM: The timing.

KJ: Yes, the way a reader reacts emotionally to something is very affected by what—

AM: By what is around it. Yes.

KJ: You arrange things in a very different way from the way your characters live them.

AM: Yes. That’s true. In “Happiness” I sort of worked back from the new year through her life to her death, which is coming, but with lots of stops and meanders.

KJ: I recently read a moving piece in the New Yorker by Joyce Carol Oates….

AM: Oh, I read that too! It was marvellous.

KJ: What resonated with me, and got me thinking again about “Too Much Happiness,” was something Oates said about her own marriage, which had apparently been a long and happy one: that her husband had never read any of her fiction. I was just stunned to hear that. And at one point she wondered if he could really know her, having not read her fiction.

AM: But did she want him to know her? When I read that I was very interested, because my husband and I have almost the same thing. Really we have. He does read my stories. But he can only read them when I’m out of the country. Or at least at a certain geographical distance. [Laughter.]

KJ: She also says they never talked at home about any of the stresses in their life. You know, if she was having trouble with a publisher or bad reviews. When I first read that they didn’t talk about anything stressful I thought, well what did they talk about?

AM: Yeah. What else is there?

KJ: They talked about books, and they talked about things in the newspaper, but not about the personal stuff. A dichotomy. There’s a similar dichotomy in your story, between the intellectual and the personal, the bodily. Sophia’s mentor, the esteemed professor, is so excited to have a pupil he can talk to about the intricacies of mathematics, and yet you keep reminding us that these brilliant minds are attached to bodies. They get ill, they have desires, they need to eat. The professor has to eat prunes to be regular.

AL: Because he has such a sedentary life.

AM: I may have made that up. It’s hard to remember.

AL: Speaking of making things up, we were wondering about the doctor that she meets on the train, whether he—

AM: It’s all made up.

KJ: We figured that must be an invention. But he is a fascinating character. I felt he was a malevolent presence, Anita not so much.

AM: No, not malevolent. He wished her well. I felt that he could see something. I don’t want to dwell on this too much because it gets all icky, you know, the idea that someone can tell what will happen to people, but I think he noticed something about her. Maybe being a doctor made a difference.

AL: Do you know why he happened into the story?

AM: Maybe I was thinking a bit about her poor husband, who the doctor resembled slightly. I find her husband a terribly sad character.

KJ: He takes his own life at the end?

AM: He did. He did. It was so awful. Was being married to an achieving woman part of his problem? Maybe it was. Does that mean that achieving women are supposed to go to a nunnery? The question never arises, does the achieving man ever present a problem?

KJ: Sophia’s own death is brought about by the long trip by train and boat she takes to avoid Copenhagen where the doctor has said there’s a small pox epidemic. But she can never confirm whether there’s any truth to that.

AM: Well actually there was. I confirmed that. But she doesn’t know that. There was a big problem because, you know, Finland and Russia were always fighting, and at that time there were a whole lot of refugees who were getting unloaded in Copenhagen. So, yes, there was an epidemic and it could have been blamed on the Finns and made a lot of trouble.

AL: So that rerouting that she takes, which, as I was reading it was horrifying—you just felt somehow that she was going the wrong way, going deeper into this desolation. And having to get on ferries, the suggestion there.

AM: It was my invention that she would take this round about route, but I did study the route, so I knew what would be happening at each point. But yes, that part of the story is where I take off from the known facts. Is it correct to do that?

AL: Why not?

AM: You think I want somebody to do it to me? I mean, if they’re writing about my real life? No.

KJ: When she speaks of the doctor later, she says he was a blind man and then she corrects herself: no, I mean a kind man. And the blind man, the English major in me took that to mean he was a prophet of sorts.

AM: I didn’t think that way at all. I just thought she made that mistake. But why did it come into her head? Or into my head.

KJ: As a mother I kept thinking: You’re going to take a pill that a stranger’s given you? Don’t do it, don’t do it!

AM: Yeah. But she does it when she’s quite far on in the trip. The difficulty of getting her baggage onto the train has just unhinged her. And of course I don’t know if that’s true either. As I get to the end I do make up a lot about how she was behaving. But not right at the end. The whole business of her death is true, even that Fifi came in—

KJ: —and danced for her mother. She really did that?

AM: No, she had danced a day or two earlier, before the children’s party. And what happens to the child of the gifted woman? Because this is always the question. I mean, when she went off to woo Maxsim in the south of France, she left her kid with one of these wonderful women who had lots of children and would take another one in. And this is where we come against the great problem. She wasn’t really what would be called a good mother. But she had to get something more out of her life.

KJ: And that’s a reproach that was brought against her.

AM: And probably she could bring it against herself if she thought of it.

AL: But this idea of judging the performance of mothers is so much a part of history, I mean, we’re just so anxious to judge mothers.

AM: I think so. Yeah. It hasn’t stopped. You know, in my generation, living with poor people on a farm, there was such a limited idea of what you could do, things like this didn’t arise, I mean in women’s lives. And there wasn’t a big thing about educating males and not females. In fact, when it came to that, in farming families, women were more likely to get an education because they would be teachers and make some money So if they had an education, OK. But writing is different. It takes so much out of you. It’s so presumptuous. It’s hard, the work you do. But what can you do? When I started writing, I just took it for granted that it was hard. But I just didn’t think that I wouldn’t be able to do it, and have my children, and everything.

KJ: Would you say it’s still hard?

AM: God it’s still hard. Every time I start a story, I wonder. Nobody with a brain in their head would do it.

AL: One of the things I found really interesting in the story is how often superstition rears up. At the beginning of the story they’re walking through a cemetery and it’s New Year’s Day and Sophia says this means one of us will die this year.

AM: That is true. She said it.

AL: Oh really?

AM: It’s not true, but she actually said it. [Laughter.]

AL: Do you think she believed it or—

AM: Oh, she could have been just flirting with him in her usual way, trying to say something interesting.

AL: But the superstition recurs in the story—like the black cat, even the doctor having a premonition.

AM: Yes.

AL: I wondered if you had intentions around that.

AM: It just sort of happened. I’m not particularly, I don’t think that way. But I felt that this story sort of took over. Things just started to happen. I hate saying things like that, it sounds so fey. But, yeah.

AL: I thought it was an interesting contrast—the idea of her being a scientist, a mathematician, and having these superstitious things following her around.

AM: I think she was, I don’t want to say superstitious, but in another generation, what would have been called very female. That means that her emotions and her emotional life meant a tremendous amount to her.

AL: What made you see that in her?

AM: I guess finding out more about her. You know, a lot of it is true. The whole business of Maxsim coming to see her, and when they fall in love, how exciting it is, and how wonderful—you know, she bandages up his leg and she goes to see him and she obviously sleeps with him. Then, the blow, when she gets the prize. I guess it was that combination that really got me. The blow with the prize, which he never really recovers from.

KJ: I can see why she was attracted to Maxsim though; he’s like this life force.

AM: Hmm-hmm! And he was smart too. Oh yes.

KJ: You don’t feel that she had a great deal of sexual attraction towards her husband. She eventually accommodates him, because it’s easier. But with Maxsim you can feel the heat.

AM: Oh yeah. And maybe for the first time, for her, I think. But I am so sorry for that first husband. The whole part where he gets involved with these people who are crooks, really, just terribly unworthy. He was a man with abilities. Why didn’t he pursue his paleontology? I don’t know. Was it uninteresting to people? Maybe one should write a book about him, all from his point of view.

AL: When you’re reading the story you feel like Sophia has all these different men in her life, a different kind of relationship with each of them: the husband, a relationship that changes over time; her mentor; Maxsim; even her sister’s husband and her nephew.

AM: Yes.

AL: The nephew sticks in my mind because of that conversation they have on the way to the train station, when he’s so scornful of what she does.

AM: I think that’s true. And I found him a really fascinating character. He says: I’m going to do something useful. I’m going to call out the stations on the bus. I’m not going to fool around with—

AL: Mathematics. Which in a way felt to me reading it as the way writers often feel the world is looking at them.

AM: [Laughs.]

AL: I wondered if that crossed your mind when you were working on the story. This idea of usefulness versus art, or versus the more abstract branches of mathematics?

AM: Certainly that was in my upbringing. But I’ve often thought that if I’d come from a different background, it would have been harder. Because nobody knew what I was doing. When they found out they weren’t terribly pleased, but I don’t know if they ever thought that I should have done something different. No, because there never was anything different.

AL: One thing I found almost a little heartbreaking, given Sophia’s brilliance and the kind of life that she’d led, was the way her uncertainty around Maxsim had her weighing his affections in an almost mathematical way, playing a ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ game. It’s a kind of calculus.

AM: Believe me, that is true. There was no way she was secure. And did he love her? That’s what I wonder too. After the first blow, which is her fame and her ability, does he love her as much?

KJ: Were you going on your own intuition here or are there documents? Did she keep a diary?

AM: Not that I know of. No. No. I’d love to know more about her. Which I think Russians know. But maybe they would find it trivial. Her trying to figure that out. It’s a terrific story about a woman trying to have it all.

KJ: The story is called “Too Much Happiness.” I’m interested in that idea: can there be an excess of happiness?

AM: I feel you could be almost crushed by happiness, lost in it. Maybe also something about paying for it. I am the child of Presbyterians.

KJ: The story sets out a number of opposing ideals of what the good life is: is it being politically engaged, is it the life of the mind, is it finding love? And why do these things so often seem mutually exclusive? It made me want to ask, if I may, what makes you happy?

AM: [Pause.] I don’t know because the conflict is always there. Writing is the final thing. But. I probably couldn’t do it without support from elsewhere. Which is interesting, the whole business of women writers, how they want to manage to do their best work without having a lonely life.

AL: Do you think that’s harder for women?

AM: Oh yes. Of course it is. I think men are often with different sorts of women at different stages, depending on what they need in life. I think women want something steady. You read about these older novelists with these young wives. No I’m being unfair. [Laughs.]

KJ: At the end, under the influence of the mysterious pill she has taken, and also her fever, Sophia enters this incredible state of excitement—I wonder if that isn’t her happiest time, when she has this notion that her mind can’t keep up with her thoughts? She’s in a fever of creativity, and yet she is also dying. It’s a bitter irony.

AM: Mm-hmm. I think that’s the happiest moment. The craziest moment for any human, that kind of creative delight before you have to get down to doing any of it. And then there’s the happiness of the person on the other side, making a comfortable human life for the writer or whatever to come back into? I don’t really know about that. Like it was with Weierstrass’s sisters?

KJ: Did she actually say, in her final moments, “Too much happiness”?

AM: I rather think she did. I don’t think I thought that up myself.