
“Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”
by Alice Munro
from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Trevor
Johanna, the character we meet at the beginning of this tremendous story, is one of my favorite characters. She is presented to us at a train depot, purchasing a one-way ticket out of town and demanding special treatment for the shipment of furniture. She is blunt and a bit cold, refusing to accept any of the stationmaster’s humor. She seems rather unlikable, and she probably would be in real life. But then she goes to finish her day’s business at a dress shop. No, she’s not suddenly pleasant and warm, but we get a better sense of the yearning she keeps buried way below, the passion she dares not utter. Sure, she is practical and might say she doesn’t like to count her chickens before they hatch. But she is also afraid. She has steeled herself to be unloved, the better to protect herself from pain, and she’s finally doing something tremendous that might — might — lead her to a life she truly desires.
Munro takes her time revealing Johanna’s fearful yearning. When she first arrives at the dress shop we still see the woman who wouldn’t smile at the train depot, a woman who has stood up and walked out, we’re confident, whenever she disapproves of something. Here she is walking into the store where she sees a full-body mirror right at the doorway.
They did that on purpose, of course. They set the mirror there so you could get a proper notion of your deficiencies, right away, and then — they hoped — you would jump to the conclusion that you had to buy something to alter the picture. Such a transparent trick that it would have made her walk out, if she had not come in determined, knowing what she had to get.
It’s that determination to come in and get what she wants that keeps her going, and slowly the dressmaker chips away with kindness (and perhaps some understanding):
“It’s the color of your eyes. You don’t need to wear velvet. You’ve got velvet eyes.”
That was the kind of soft-soaping Johanna would have felt bound to scoff at, except that at the moment it seemed to be true. Her eyes were not large, and if asked to describe their color she would have said, “I guess they’re a kind of brown.” But now they looked to be a really deep brown, soft and shining.
I love how Munro says this is the kind of thing she would have “felt bound to scoff at,” suggesting this is code she lives by perhaps more than it is a natural reaction. No, we see her natural reaction start to peak out there at the end, when she sees the beauty in her brown eyes for, it seems, the first time.
This softness exposed, it is difficult for Johanna to contain one of her deepest secrets: she is going to be married. She actually, against all her better judgment, against all of her self-taught discipline, tells this to the dressmaker. And here Munro again reveals some of the reasons why Johanna is so quiet about her desires:
She had revealed to this woman what she was counting on, and that had perhaps been an unlucky thing to do.
She feels it is unlucky. She feels she might jinx the whole thing. She lives by the code of not expecting much. And certainly, if you expect anything, don’t let it out . . . that leads to disappointment.
But in this case, Johanna has a good reason for thinking that mentioning the wedding is unlucky. It turns out the wedding has never been brought up by her intended husband. They’ve exchanged letters over time, but never once has marriage been brought up. This is incredibly negligent, even I think, but it shows just how much desire and hope is flowing beneath Johanna’s otherwise tremendously fixed and stony facade. She allows herself to take the occurrence of a wedding for granted:
She felt a fool for mentioning a wedding, when he hadn’t mentioned it and she ought to remember that. So much else had been said — or written — such fondness and yearning expressed, that the actual marrying seemed just to have been overlooked. The way you might speak about getting up in the morning and not about having breakfast, though you certainly intended to have it.
This is just the first bit of this rich story. Munro takes us from Johanna to Mr. McCauley, Johanna’s employer of a sort. Johanna, you see, has been hired to watch over a young girl named Sabitha, Mr. McCauley’s granddaughter. Sabitha’s mom, Mr. McCauley’s daughter, has died. Sabitha’s father, Ken Boudreau, is impoverished and cannot care for Sabitha himself. He frequently asks his father-in-law for financial help. And it just so happens he is the one Johanna thinks she will marry.
This all turns into quite the messy situation, and we see that much of what we thought of Johanna and her upcoming marriage is based on misunderstandings and outright cruelty. The furniture she wants to ship to her new home belonged to Ken and his deceased wife, but Mr. McCauley, given how much he’s helped Ken over the years, feels he has no right. That’s minor, though, compared to the real problem: the letters Johanna has received and responded to were not written by Ken at all. They were written by Sabitha and her bored friend Edith.
This looks like certain disaster. How will Ken Boudreau receive her when she unexpectedly arrives.We, of course, expect Johanna to find a confused and perhaps even mocking unknowing and unwilling suitor, her brief excursion into a hope for companionship shut down quickly and for good, causing her to further entrench herself into her own brand of cruel practicality. That’s what Mr. McCauley would expect, if he cared. And as for Sabitha and Judith, perhaps they’d even hope for that unpleasant reception and the ensuing fallout.
I don’t want to spoil this for those who haven’t read it, but I will say I’m thrilled with how this all went about.
Betsy
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is a cumbersome title. Curiously, Munro’s very next book and all of its stories are each titled by just one word. Hateship, etc is very hard to say and even harder to remember.
What is strange about this title is that it has no euphony, no rhythm, no rhyme, and, given its wandering length, no punch.
Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage refers to a guessing game akin to he loves me, he loves me not, which involves pulling the petals off a daisy, thus playing on the question of whether game, accident, or happenstance are the primary determinants in one’s life. Housekeeper Johanna ends up a mother to Omar, something that never would have happened if two fourteen year olds had not played a dirty trick on her.
The dirty trick? They composed love letters and signed them as being from a handsome airman who happened to be the scalliwag father of one of the girls.
Here’s the key thing, however. Johanna, while unsophisticated, uncharming, poor, and orphaned, is phenomenally self-sufficient and competent. Someone else could have had such a dirty trick played upon her and not survived it. Another person might have failed the various challenges that the dirty trick set into motion. Not Johanna. She manages and triumphs over what fate and accident have dealt her.
What interests me about the story?
1: It’s a fairy tale, like “My Mother’s Dream.” A woman carves out a life of unlikely success through resolve and an ability for management. She succeeds where many fail, and finds through her enterprise: “And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.”
There is a fairy god-mother in the form of Mrs. Willets. Johanna served Mrs. Willets in her old age, and for her caring, Mrs. Willets left money to Johanna: “The sum was not dazzling, but it was impressive.”
As Cinderella, Johanna was not beautiful, but she was able. Through her capacity for loyalty, a inclination for thrift, and the ability to take charge, she outshines in ways many beautiful people cannot.
2: The story explores the complications of “unearned advantage.” One of the teenagers, Edith, envies her friend Sabitha for her unearned advantage. Sabitha has a well-to-do family, breasts, nice clothes and has adventures despite doing nothing, or being unable to do much, in school. Sabitha’s father, the airman, has an unearned advantage, too, in that he is charming and good-looking. Sabitha’s grandfather MacCauley, Johanna’s employer, had not earned the money that allowed him to keep an office in town where he hardly did any work. He, his daughter Marcelle, and Sabitha appear to have been addled by their unearned advantage. Money, perhaps, has turned them into simpletons. Marcelle is way too easily attracted to drugs and men, Sabitha has been held back a grade, and the father is unwitting in the management of his son-in-law.
Edith, in contrast, is smart. But her father is just a cobbler. Edith will have to trade on her brains. The irony is that the airman who attracts a rescuer only has looks, charm, and a pilot’s reputation as his unearned advantage. He lacks follow-through and common sense. Opposed to all this unearned advantage is Johanna, whose middle-name is service and whose habit is hard work. As such, she joins such others as Millicent in “A Real Life,” Violet in “Queer Streak,” and Enid in “The Love of a Good Woman.”
3: Delirium plays a role as a turning point in this story as it does in “My Mother’s Dream.” It is as if sometimes people have to hit rock bottom, emotionally, to grasp the simple things. The airman appears to be out of his head with fever when Johanna arrives and saves him from more than just a fever.
4: Clothes are enjoyed for their ability to transform. Johanna buys a simple brown wool dress with a gold belt.
She had never in her life had this silly feeling of being enhanced by what she put on herself.
Sabitha comes back from a vacation with her cousins:
She wore a sort of play suit, with shorts cut like a skirt and buttons down the front and frills over the shoulder in a becoming blue color . . . and when she leaned over to pick up her glass of coffee, she displayed a smooth, glowing cleavage.
None of the “subtle luxury” for Sabitha. Even Sabitha’s father has boots he’s bought in England, boots which establish the only person with whom he talks openly — his cobbler — as his inferior. But the reader sees the “unearned advantage”: the cobbler listens because he cannot afford to turn his customer away.
As for Johanna, it’s her work clothes that save the day. It’s when she says “I’ve got biscuits in the oven” that she truly and completely wins her case.
Clothes are a favorite thing in which Munro occasionally indulges. I am reminded particularly of “How I Met Your Father,” “A Real Life,” and “What Is Remembered.” Probably others, too.
5. Names in Alice Munro should never go unnoticed.
“Marcelle” is the name of a flibberty-gibbet character who has the same name as a hair style popular about the time she was born.
“Sabitha” is more a corruption of a New Testament name than a name. Also, it sounds like sabotage and sad.
“Mrs. Willets” reminds me of the gorgeously gray and graceful shorebird. It’s a perfect name for a benefactor, even if in person, due to her character, she was someone needing being taken care of.
As for the baby named “Omar” I can only say that it is a mystery. Perhaps he is in opposition to Macaulay the writer/statesman/historian, or perhaps he is representative of how Omar Khayyam (1048 – 1131), the mathematician, scientist, and poet swept the Victorian imagination. Three things are notable about Khayyam: first, his proof of the parallel axiom. I note it not because I understand it, but because Munro always has multiple parallels going on in her stories. I also note it because Khayyam declared that religion had failed him. And finally, he was thought by some to be a Sufi mystic. This is interesting because there was a debate about it, and debate, ambiguity, and the corruption of memory are key in Munro. But primarily, I think “Omar” suggests the exotic that overtook Johanna when Ken let her love him.
Dynia is a suffix from the Greek meaning pain. Gdynia is a port city in Poland, but it is Joanna’s trip to the underworld, to a prairie city that’s hotter than Hades, near Regina, and a city she must escape. G-dynia reminds me of gyno-dynia, a word I have made up, meaning woman’s pain. To a degree, the story suggests that a competent woman must manage the pain of being a woman as competently as she manages everything else.
6: Responsibility and Experience: Are we responsible for the bad things we do in our youth? This is a question that repeats itself in “Child’s Play.”
7: “Hateship” is a portrait of the writer as a young girl, the period when you have no idea how to use the awesome ability you know you possess. Edith is deeply talented, but she uses her talent to mock a decent woman. Ironically, Edith’s writing moves Johanna to take stock of herself and her possibilities, and to take a terrific leap. But it’s a close call. The experiment could have ended badly for everyone. The reader is put in mind of the responsibilities of the writer, or put in mind of the fact that if you do not learn how to wield your immense talent, you will get nowhere, so to speak. One wonders where Edith will get her guidance. Munro has very little respect for the university. She has apparently said that had she stayed at university it might have ruined her as a writer, intimidated her too much. All those male professors telling her what to think? Instead, we see, over and over, that reading in solitary is the habit of a writer, and that the library is the true alma mater or “nourishing mother.”
8: Airmen: Pilots play a role in several stories — “How I Met My Husband,” “White Dump,” and “My Mother’s Dream.” Pilots are like clothes; I think Munro really enjoys writing about both subjects. They get her going. She enjoys herself. Geology and history are more arcane topics that also get her going.
9: The story is an antidote to “A Wilderness Station,” in which the mail order bride could have been murdered, twice over. It feels similar to “A Real Life,” in which a very unconventional woman wins over a very desirable man, one because he is wealthy, and the other because he is attractive.
10. The technical difficulty — transformation: Munro wants to depict the transformation of a very plain woman into a believable lover. She uses joy in being a rescuer as the lever as well as self-discovery as the pay-off. The joy is in service and hard work. I think the scene where Joanna buys the dress is where the reader is invited to think “Makeover!” But the real makeover occurs when Joanna gets out to Gdynia and proclaims to the man who gave her a ride, “I am a dunce.”
11. Power. It’s acquired by experience, as when Johanna says, “I am a dunce.” Edith has talent but she misuses it. Her talent, as of yet, lacks power. When Johanna says, “I’ve got biscuits in the oven,” we know that this is the skill gained from experience, and skill aptly applied. It’s here that we know there is life, there is hope, and there is also transformation. It would be a fairy tale, except that we all know for a fact that some men are rescued by women. (And vice versa.)
12. Tu ne quaesieris, Scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi is the clipped excerpt which ends the story where Edith sits doing her Latin 4 homework. The actual Horace poems ends with the much more famous “Carpe Diem” saying that dominates the 1989 Peter Weir film, Dead Poets Society.
Horace: Odes 1.11:
Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibifinem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios
temptaris numeros. ut melius, quidquid erit, pati.
seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare
Tyrrhenum. Sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula posteroAsk not (’tis forbidden knowledge), what our destined term of years,
Mine and yours; nor scan the tables of your Babylonish seers.
Better far to bear the future, my Leuconoe, like the past,
Whether Jove has many winters yet to give, or this our last;
This, that makes the Tyrrhene billows spend their strength against the shore.
Strain your wine and prove your wisdom; life is short; should hope be more?
In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebb’d away.
Seize the present; trust tomorrow e’en as little as you may.
This is how Munro finishes the story:
Ignoring her mother, she wrote, “You must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know –“
She paused, chewing her pencil, then finished off with a chill of satisfaction, “— what fate has in store for me. Or for you — “
Notice how much better Munro’s choice of translation is than the Wikipedia one.
13. Clitoridectomy: This is the mother who has told Edith she must not wear her rubbers indoors or she will go blind. This is corrupt “wisdom.” This is bad sex education for boys corrupted into ridiculous education for girls. But her mother had got one thing right —
Years ago, before she knew what she was doing, she had gone to sleep with the blanket between her legs and her mother had discovered her and told her about a girl she had known who did things like that all the time and eventually had to be operated on for the problem.
Yikes.
This is a subject about which I know very little. But a little web-surfing brought me to an article about the availability of surgical clitoridectomy in Victorian London.
In 1866 Baker Brown took this further in another publication: On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy and Hysteria in Females. Here, he suggested that his sheer success in curing previously intractable cases proved his ideas worked. His method, he insisted, was “humane and effectual”, a speedy answer to problems including hysteria, fits, catalepsy, “idiocy”, and mania. A woman who, according to her husband, would “fly at him, and rend his skin, like a tigress”, was quite well after the operation and “became in every respect a good wife.”
Obviously, I have not done a scientific review of the topic. But what Munro is suggesting is borne out by a quick search. The connection to the story? Edith and Sabitha were eager to know more about sex, and the information they were provided was either very negative, as in the case of Edith’s mother, or very experimental, as in the case of the girls Sabitha heard about who were trying out various sexual routines on each other in boarding school.
What does Edith’s ignorance or Sabitha’s hearsay have to do with the letters they wrote to Johanna? For sure, Sabitha’s handsome father was a lure for them, as was their own loneliness. Edith’s letters (written as if she were Ken Boudreau) were wonderful wish fulfilments, fantastic fairy tales. Munro shows how much they have to learn about sex, about men, and about Ken Boudreau.
What does clitoridectomy have to do with the story as a whole? Not a lot, on the one hand, and quite a bit, on the other. The subject sets up the issue of women as property and the danger embedded in being someone’s property. Johanna was an orphan; Sabitha was motherless. Johanna’s cleverness and courage is set against the way society wants to surgically remove power from women. A combination of warm heart and hard work wins Johanna a place in a world which can otherwise be cruel. All the more reason to “Seize the Day.”
And then there’s this. Ken tells us that Marcelle, Sabitha’s mother had been subject to “bad behavior.” Her father tells us it was hard to tell what was wrong with her – she was a “sickly brown color,” and she watched “cartoons she was surely too old for.” How was it Marcelle happened to die? From a mysterious surgical procedure in London?
Marcelle went away to London to have some female thing done and died in the hospital.
Then we have Edith, who feels like an orphan even though she lives with her parents, and imagines the time when she will almost surgically remove herself from their care.
14. Compare Johanna and Marcelle. The one dies a mysterious death; the other appears to travel to the underworld and carry a dying lover back to life. Both Marcelle and Johanna are Ken’s partners, but the one is a failure and the other a success. One is born into unearned advantage, and the other is born alone, with no advantages except what she can create for herself.
15. At fifty pages, the story is kind of sprawling. I note the issues of power in it that crop up again in “Floating Bridge.”
I have decided to set aside some time this weekend to read this story, so I only read the very beginning of each of your commentaries. I’ll wait until after I have read the story before doing that. But Betsy’s comment on the title got me thinking. When I first saw the title I also thought it was a bit of a mouthful, but without any other context I thought it might refer to a progression of a relationship. I was reminded of the famous relationship between Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe in the Anne of Green Gables book series. Initially, she hares him, but then they become friends, then he courts her, they fall in love, and finally are married. Betsy’s comment seems to indicate that’s not how Munro uses the title. But when you mentioned the game, I wondered if it was a real game (separate from the book) or one Munro just made up. After a quick google, I found a website that explained it all. It seem the game is more commonly known as “Love, Hate, Friendship, or Marriage” and the way it is played does not involve flowers, but the letters of the names of the two people in question. I’ll be back to comment after I read the story, but for now here’s a link to the site with the explanation: http://www.villainy.com/lhfm/lhfm.html
[Addendum: A little more googling and I found a slightly more complicated version that also is done using names, but the game has an easier to remember name as it forms the acronym FLAME. See the explanation of that version here: https://www.wikihow.com/Play-%22Flame%22 ]
I share Trevor´s enthusiasm about this story.
“Hateship” is a homage to age-old storytelling – or is it irony?
It begins with ‘once upon a time there was a red haired woman’ and ends in the spirit of ‘they lived happily ever after’, which brings to mind “One Thousand and One Nights”. In between there are on several occasions great expectations, although the reading is “David Copperfield”.
Like “Arabian Nights”, this story has a lot of plot, unusual for a Alice Munro story. In a “The Atlantic” interview, 12/2001, Munro emphasized that the story depends on plot more than usual, in contrast to most of her stories, where ‘the plot really isn´t the most important element’.
The reader thinks that the protagonist is destined to certain heartbreak and humiliation, but when Johanna sees what kind of chaos she has arrived in, the shift from romance to reality is swift. She achieves her dream by strenght of will and lots of practical wisdom.
If Edith had been adult when writing the letters, she could be considered a cruel sociopath with her prank. Instead she changes two lives for the better.
I´d guess that in 2001 many of Munro´s female readers were experience experts on the game that gave it´s name to the story and the book.
To Betsys 8.: Alice Munro´s childhood home was – and still is – bordering a private airdrome, turf airstrip. Single-engine airplanes took of and landed just a few hundred meters away. She knows well both the lives of pilots and airplanes in rural Ontario around 1950.
Nowadays the airdrome is called Inglis Field, officially CWH5, with a runway just short of 1000 meters.
I’m enjoying this story so much that I’m taking my time reading it. It has a very leisurely pace like a small town on a quiet weekend, which makes a slow read fitting. It might take a day or two more before I get around to commenting on the story. When I do I have a long bit of Canadiana to contribute inspired by Ken sending Sabitha a $2 bill, but that’s a subject for another day. The reason I am posting today is because I just discovered that this story was adapted into a film in 2013, a full, feature length film under the title Hateship Loveship. The director is relatively unknown , but much of the cast is not. The cast includes:
Kristen Wiig as Johanna Parry
Nick Nolte as Mr. McCauley
Hailee Steinfeld as Sabitha
Guy Pearce as Ken Boudreau
Jennifer Jason Leigh as Chloe
The film got very mixed reviews (51% on Rotten Tomatoes but 64% from the “top critics”; 59% on Metacritic). It also is set in 21st century USA (Ken lives in Chicago; the girls use a fake email address to fool Johanna) making me wonder how much of the depth of the story was left behind in the translation to film, but I am curious enough to want to see the film anyway, and I haven’t even finished reading the story yet! Even if you don’t want to see the film (or can’t find it), the 2-minute trailer is easy to find online.
This story is brilliant. I have a jumble of thoughts about it, but overall I feel like I cannot praise this story enough. At just a hair under 18,000 words, it is at the bottom end of the range usually given for novellas, but the content feels more like the scope you would expect from a short story (even a long one). I am reminded of James Joyce’s “The Dead” and Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”, a couple of favourite stories, not because theses stories share any themes, characters, or plots, but because all three have a slow stroll of a pace where when I read them I don’t know where I am going, am not sure I’m really going anywhere, but greatly enjoy the view along the way.
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I have to disagree with Munro’s comment about the importance of plot to the story. Yes, there is a plot meandering about in there, but it never really took a central place in the story until Johanna gets off the train. The way the story starts is very much not about plot at all. We get the encounter at the train station to start, then a second one at the shop, and then we are introduced to Mr. McCauley. Each of these sections is like a thoughtful meditation on the characters of the people and in the process Munro paints a very precise portrait of what life and people in a small town are like. The station agent would say he knew everyone in town, which means he knew half, the ones who matter or are connected in the right way to those who matter. Mr. McCauley’s neighbours are people from away, which makes them part of the town but not really. The woman who owns the dress shop is a non-local local too. And then there is Johanna herself. From another country by birth, and strange in her own wonderful way, the most alien local of all.
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Edith would be an easy character to overlook or see as fairly one-dimensional or having a purely plot-serving role in the story, but I really liked how she is presented. Betsy sees her as a writer in the early stages of development, but I see her as someone who is of the small town who longs to get out, fears she might not, and who seems more invested in the Johanna-Ken relationship than someone might be if this were just a prank. I don;t think she identifies with Johanna or has any feelings for Ken, but it is easy to see that she writes the sort of letters that she might want to receive, to have someone in her life like the fictional version of Ken she creates. (Perhaps the Ken of Barbie and Ken?)
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This story also has a great example of Munro leaving things unsaid that we might wonder about, but left that way for a purpose. When Johanna sees Ken, he doesn’t know why she’s there. She doesn’t mention the letters. We don’t know if they ever discuss why she came west. We just know that they got married and started a family. Did Johanna ever discover that Ken didn’t write the letters? Did Ken ever learn about them? If they did, how did they react to it? We know none of that. But Munro doesn’t want us to speculate on what happened. Her point in leaving it all out is that it doesn’t matter. Not to them and it should not matter to us. What matters is that Johanna made the journey, that she needed him and he needed her, and they just decided to make it work and it did. Munro shows great restraint here and in other places with similar effect.
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Betsy mentioned names, and I don’t have much to say about them, but I did notice that “Boudreau” is a common French-Canadian name. [NB: In the film I mentioned above they changed Ken’s name to “Gaudet”, another common French-Canadian name. Not sure why they changed it, but they at least kept the cultural reference.] “Marcelle” is also a common French name (and her married name would have been “Marcelle Boudreau”, doubling down on the French name). “Sabitha” is a common name in India and “Omar” is a common name in the Middle East. “Gdynia”, as Betsy points out, is the name of a city in Poland. I wonder if Munro was intentionally making a wide range of international references with the names to suggest a universal story here. On a more story / practical level, Ken was an airman so in the war he might have met people from the middle east, so “Sabitha” and “Omar” might be his ideas for name. I also thought that since the story begins roughly around 1960 and Omar Sharif became a star in 1962 with Lawrence of Arabia he name could come from that as well.
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Finally, I want to comment on the $2 bill. Ken sends Sabitha a $2 bill. Not just two dollars. Not two $1 bills. He sends a $2 bill. Maybe there is no significance to that, but….
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For most of the 20th century $2 bills were not commonly used in western Canada. When I first heard that this was the case, I was surprised and thought it sounded more like a myth than a fact. But then in the early spring of 1987, I traveled to western Canada for a couple of weeks. Like Johanna, I traveled by train. My journey was four days. Hers would have been three. Having taken this train trip many times, I wonder what Johanna’s experience would have been like. I brought Les Miserables with me. I see her more as someone stoically looking out the window watching the country pass by. Like her, love was a reason for my trip. But the similarities end there. I got off the train in Winnipeg Manitoba and walked around for a couple of hours. I went into a store and saw for my own eyes what I had been told. The cash register only had four slots for bills. They had ones, fives, tens, and twenties. In eastern Canada they all had five slots, the other being for twos. As I traveled further west, finally reaching my destination in Edmonton Alberta, I found it was the same. There were $2 bills in circulation, but they were not common. (Stores put them under the ones in the same slot).
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Shortly after I returned from that trip, things started to change. Canada got rid of the $1 bill in June 1987, just three months later, replacing it with a coin. After that, the $2 bill was the lowest denomination bill, and so became more widely used in the west. Then, in 1996, Canada got rid of the $2 bill and replaced it with a coin as well. Younger Canadians probably don’t know that there ever was this strange difference in the circulation of $2 bills in Canada. They probably also don’t know the reason they were less common in the west. You see, when western Canada was first being settled, in the first half of the 20th century, $2 was supposedly the price of a prostitute, and so the $2 bill became seen as “dirty” money, money decent people did not want to use. It was considered especially vulgar for a male to give a $2 bill to a female. Yet in this story, Ken, living out west, does exactly that. At first I thought it was just odd, as it did not seem likely that he was suggesting (or that Munro was suggesting) that Sabitha was a prostitute. But then we find out near the end of the story that Ken doubts that Sabitha is actually his daughter. So the $2 bill might be a comment about Sabitha’s mother, Marcelle, and not Sabitha herself.
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One last note. I tried the hateship friendship game using the names Ken Boudreau & Johanna Parry, using the rules as described on the first site I linked to above, and using the five-outcome version from Munro’s title instead of the four-outcome version from that webstie. The result? “Marriage”, of course.
Many thanks to both Harri and David for their careful and interesting notes! Harri – The airstrip near Alice’s childhood home is new to me. Didn’t know about the movie, David. Also – I enjoyed this observation:
“What matters is that Johanna made the journey, that she needed him and he needed her, and they just decided to make it work and it did.”
SHORT SUMMARY OF PLOT
Johanna’s is a no-nonsense world of care and resourcefulness, and Ken’s need for care and management is right up her alley. Mischievous teenagers inadvertently bring them together. (This summary uses a couple of phrases from the story.)
I read the story a few years ago – unfortunately I haven’t had time to re-read it recently. So I won’t attempt a score. But I remember liking the story a lot.
Harri, I think this is the interview you’re talking about:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/bringing-life-to-life/303056/
There Munro talks about her method of reading a story. It’s extraordinary. And so completely contrary to something I was thinking, to do with how one can never re-create one’s first reading of a story. That much of the craft of story-telling, and the experience of reading a story, is to do with how the story unfolds, and what the reader learns as they progress through the story, stuff that gets modified as they go on to learn more about the plot or the characters. To me this is a huge part of the brilliance of Munro’s stories and why I tend to the view that with her stories ‘plot is everything’. Although it might be more accurate to say ‘the plot and its structure is everything’.
Which is of course rather an exaggeration. Maybe I’m just trying to emphasise that until you sort out an accurate picture of the action of one of her stories, you’re on insecure ground in trying to work out what the story is ‘about’. Because her stories are of course about so much more than the plot. And so in that interview perversely I find myself finding this a good description of the experience of reading a Munro story:
“A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows….”
I say ‘perverse’ because I largely mean the experience of reading a Munro story and its complex richness – in a straight line from beginning to end, with the plot structure doing the ‘wandering back and forth’. But apparently Munro herself doesn’t read stories in this way. Ha ha.
Maybe I’m even starting to confuse myself at this point.
Anyway I’d have to agree with David that ‘Hateship, Friendship..’ didn’t seem to me any more about plot than many other Munro stories.
Another ‘everyone lived happily ever after’ Munro story? I’m beginning to think she’s written more of these than I’d realised.
A small point. Something I seemed to have noted during my first reading: the text doesn’t actually confirm that Ken is Sabitha’s father?
Howard, about the paternity of Sabitha, the reader is given no reason to doubt that Ken is her father (or even to wonder if he is her father) until near the end of the story when Munro describes Ken “accepting Sabitha as his child when he had his doubts”. That’s the only mention of the subject. I would put the question of whether or not Ken really is Sabitha’s father in the category of ones where the answer does not matter and Munro is not inviting us to speculate on it. What does matter is that everyone thinks he is her father and he is unsure if he is or not.
Maybe the plot is not very important in “Hateship”, but it seems to have been important to Munro. Presumably she designed the story plot first, not usual in her way of working.
Barbie and Ken were a 60´s fad, not there for Edith to dream on..
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David, re the ‘things left unsaid’ at the end of the story. From my memory of reading the story several years ago, the sudden ‘appearance’ of Omar is one of the story’s greatest plot/plot structure successes. I remember distinctly how he took me by surprise. So Munro successfully elicited more or less the same reaction as Edith’s family from me: ‘The only news was Omar.’ I wouldn’t think of Munro achieving this effect by virtue of ‘restraint’ so much as skillful editing.
This reminds me how the first reading of a Munro story is uniquely valuable. Only on the first reading, when you don’t know how the story is going to unfold, are you truly subjected, full on, no holds barred, to the writer’s guile.
A couple of other examples…
I first read Cortes Island for the first time in December 2018. When I looked at the story again some months later, I found it easy to forget that, for example, until the 1923 news-cuttings enter the story, we know hardly anything about the Gorrie family’s history. That, say, Mr Gorrie isn’t Mrs Gorrie’s first husband – or that Ray is Mr Gorrie’s stepson.
Or the episode with the girl in the car in Save The Reaper. When I first read the story I was shouting at Eve “get her out of the car”. On subsequent readings I was much more relaxed about the matter. Ha ha.
Harri, I was not saying that Edith is actually thinking about Ken as an object of her fantasy. In fact, I think I said the opposite. But for the record, the Ken doll was introduced in 1961, which puts it at the same time as the story is set, which means it is possible the name was chosen by Munro as a reference to the doll.