Once a year, David travels to visit Stella; they have been divorced for 8 years (they were married for 21 years), and this year he brings Catherine, the woman he is with.
But Catherine is not his “new girl”; that is Dina — without the ‘h’ — whose picture he shows to Stella later in the day. Stella is unsurprised, and this show-and-tell routine is familiar to her, but it is unsettling for the reader, who has not even yet gotten a sense of Catherine.
Immediately, however, the reader is introduced to Stella. As David drives up, Stella steps out of the bushes, where she has been picking berries.
“She is a short, fat, white-haired woman, wearing jeans and a dirty T-shirt. There is nothing underneath these clothes, as far as he can see, to support or restrain any part of her.”
She lives in the family home, a summer house on clay bluffs overlooking Lake Huron; it feels like the same setting as ‘Walking on Water” (in Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You).
Nearby, her father inhabits the Balm of Gilead Nursing Home, which also overlooks the lake. David always visits him on these annual treks as well, bringing a bottle for the old man.
David recognizes the importance of these visits for Stella’s father, but he still feels a sense of inferiority.
“In his father-in-law’s eyes David would always be somebody learning how to be a man, somebody who might never learn, might never achieve the steadfastness and control, the decent narrowness of range.”
Stella’s perception is different; she sees her father respond to David in a peculiarly affecting way, and she grants it a significance that challenges the integral father-daughter bond.
“I suppose if he thought about you and me he’d have to be on my side, but that’s all right, he doesn’t have to think about it.”
Her father doesn’t have to think about it because Stella has not allowed David’s antagonism to colour their relationship following the divorce.
There is a solidity to Stella’s character, and an acceptance of her quiet life on the lake. For all that David harshly critiques and challenges her, she remains staid and seemingly undisturbed.
She is writing an article on the history of the lighthouse and has been researching the wrecks of the Great Lakes; she has tracked its sweeping patterns of illumination, its history of bringing vulnerable crafts to shore safely, and she has mapped the submerged dangers and debris of the ships lost beneath the surface.
The reader has the sense that Stella knows: she knows the truth of these things and she knows David’s truth too.
She knows that while Catherine is cast in the light, what appeals most to David is Dina, who exists only in the shadows.
David calls that “real love”, but he recognizes that other people don’t understand things the same way.
“People don’t have any patience with this sort of suffering, and why should they? The sufferer must forgo sympathy, give up on dignity, cope with the ravages. And on top of that, people will take time out to tell you that this isn’t real love. These bouts of desire and dependence and worship and perversity, willed but terrible transformations – they aren’t real love.”
He is desperate for Stella’s sympathy, for her to acknowledge what he feels for Dina, this “desire and dependence and worship and perversity”; he is desperate not only for Stella to see the photo, but for her to see what the photo means to him.
The reader understands that once it was Catherine’s photo which he showed to Stella, that he was just as desperate, in some distant time, for her to marvel at Catherine’s image, at all the promise beneath the surface of that photograph. “Lichen” is about a single visit, but simultaneously it is about the series of visits, the patterns that underlie them.
Catherine bears some similarity to the narrators in “Hard-Luck Stories” and “Bardon Bus”, women who have once identified a particular quality in a relationship but who have, since, reevaluated. In many ways, Catherine appears disconnected from the events of “Lichen”, distanced not only from David, but from the story itself.
Stella is the story’s focus. Catherine is not fully fleshed out and appears to be both knowing and oblivious, but when she speaks to Stella, it is clear that Catherine intuits more of David’s intent than he would guess.
She says: “It can make you mean. Love can make you mean. If you feel dependent on somebody, then you can be mean to them. I understand that in David.”
By this time, after the day has unfolded, the reader understands that David is desperate for the unknowing.
“You know, there’s a smell women get…when they know you don’t want them anymore. Stale.”
But the reader recognizes that something in David is what has gone stale, that staleness inhabits his being, that he only reaches for these new relationships in an effort to distract from it.
This is why he is no longer married to Stella.
“He could never feel any lightness, any secret and victorious expansion, with a woman who knew so much. She was bloated with all she knew.”
But Dina? Dina is fresh. In the picture he shows Stella, her “legs are spread wide – smooth, golden, monumental: fallen columns. Between them is the dark blot she called moss, or lichen.”
That’s what Stella thought it looked like, moss or lichen. It suits the lakeside setting, but it also suits the theme of the story, for lichen is a type of fungus that develops a symbiotic relationship with algae.
Stella sees the lichen in Dina, in the blurred photograph, but she is the crusty coating on the rock that creates the environment in which David once thrived.
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Alice Munro’s stories, as I read through her work to date. She is one of my MRE authors. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story. This story is the second in The Progress of Love, with Thursday November 1st reserved for “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux” (the next two Thursdays being filled with International Festival of Authors’ posts).
It wasn’t until I looked up “lichen” (and, really, I was intending to look for images!) that the tiny niggling question I had in the beginning (*why* did David keep going back, *why* did Stella play hostess) grew into something bigger.
The passages that you’ve noted make me wonder, too, if Stella is presenting herself as deliberately as David is (although, ironically, the reader only learns of this through the insecurity about his hair colour, which David chose to express to Catherine, not Stella) or if she really is the woman naturally emerging that she seems to be (but we do meet her first through David’s eyes, too).
And if it is actually Catherine — and not Stella, after all — who knows about the hair colour, which woman is actually lighter with unknowing? That changes the slant on that whole situation substantially.
I’m so glad that you raised the question of the collection’s title; I had already forgotten it, but obviously Munro did not. Yes, indeed, what are we to make of this “progress”? What of the 21 years, the 8 years, this day?
It might seem, from the outside, that David is making progress, because there is constant movement on his part, but of course it’s not that simple. Though Stella is openly judged for not progressing with home repairs/maintenance, perhaps her seeming stagnancy smacks more of progress than David’s changing circumstances. And, yet, I’m not sure there’s any evidence of that either.
On my first read through this story this time around, it all seemed clear to me too: David was adolescent and unlikely to change and Stella was a strong woman, a survivor, probably too good for David to begin with. But then I had another look and some other pieces of information began to present themselves. David and Stella had been married 21 years, separated for 8 years. They had two children and he never once refers to them in this story. Very near the beginning of the story on arrival at the summer house, David tells Catherine that Stella has `turned into a troll`. Several pages later David is said to use`the term `trollop`when he describes Dina and says he knows that he will eventually move on from her. The similarity of word choice here intrigues me. Does it say more about David than the women and, if so, what exactly does it say about David? David thinks Stella has presented herself in a certain way on purpose because she is “the sort of woman who has come bursting out of the female envelope at this age”: there is a degree of reflection here that makes me suspect that there is more to David than I thought initially. Stella says to Catherine “Listen to him still sounding like a husband”, David comes every year to visit his father-in-law and brings a present and, in a conversation about David’s work, Stella is described as scolding “wifely” when David denigrates his work in education. This makes me think these two people have a shared past that neither dismisses easily. In a discussion with Catherine, the latter points out that David is dyeing his hair and Stella is genuinely surprised and then Catherine says she thinks David was afraid Stella might say something. For me this hints at something deep in the Stella-David relationship that was/is probably quite important but, of which, Stella herself was unaware. And there is this: “All his ordinary and extraordinary life…seemed stored up in her [Stella]” and “He could never feel any lightness, any secret and victorious expansion, with a woman who knew so much.” With all this, the relational aspects of this story became richer and fuller and much less certain. Is the symbiotic relationship between Stella and David the major one represented here and if such a relationship is mutually advantageous by definition was it out of balance eight years ago and is that why David left?
And how does one link this story to the “progress” of love? Did anyone make any real progress in learning to love? Catherine said she and Stella could get along fine without David. David was looking forward to a time with Dina and he actually says the “real love – that would be going on living with Stella, or taking on Catherine” so he had learned that much but was opting for something else. Was this progress? Perhaps so.
The best chuckle for me in this story was in the Ron and Mary conversation and the reference to “simple serpents” and “civil serpents” for the term civil servants. Kudos to Alice Munro for posing more questions than answers once again.
“it also suits the theme of the story, for lichen is a type of fungus that develops a symbiotic relationship with algae.” What an insight! I guess this would make David the algae – pond scum – very fitting.
I really liked Stella, which was intended I’m sure, and I liked what I knew of Catherine. It was that quote about being mean that clinched it about her for me. Both women were far too decent for David.
I’ve known men like David (not necessarily been involved with them) and Munroe captures that shallow, looking-but-not-seeking, personality brilliantly in such a short story.
I had fully intended to write my own post about this story to link you but time got away from me, so I’ll have to make do with commenting. Thanks for ‘hosting’.
Well, I suppose there’s an argument that David could be the bit on the rock and Stella is the algae (with its watery origins). But maybe it’s more about the fact that they’re both in there together at this stage anyway?
Isn’t it odd how immediately likeable Stella is? Perhaps it’s just that “bursting out of the envelope” bit that Sandra quotes below, which makes her so appealing for the reader straight off?
And, yet, David is not a caricature either. Even if only through his bond with Stella, he’s not entirely unsympathetic; it’s clear that he, too, is struggling to find something “real”, desperate for a sense of connection that has eluded him so far.
(And, by all means, I’m happy to “host”!)
It seems like Catherine knew she was on the way out, and not all that bothered by it. As soon as whoever David is with clues in to just what he is like, he’s ready to move on to the next. Your description of his wish for the “unknowing” is a good one–I hadn’t thought of it quite like that until I read your post. And I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the lichen description. It all sort of comes together now in my mind!
[Edited by BIP to add the link to Danielle’s post on this story.]
I didn’t really have a sense that she was either bothered or unbothered by it; she seemed to be rather disconnected from the events that unfolded, although she seemed to feel more of a connection to Stella (even in defending her against David’s judgements at the beginning) than David. It seems that even under the best of circumstances that would have been a demanding get-together for someone in Catherine’s position, spending time in your partner’s ex-wife’s home, so I felt sympathetic to her immediately.