Category: Alice Munro

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“Vandals”
by Alice Munro
from Open Secrets

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Trevor

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]H[/fusion_dropcap]ere we are finishing up another of Alice Munro’s great short story collections. While we are about to move on to The Love of a Good Woman, it is not at all tempting to just “get through” what may be one of Munro’s greatest stories, “Vandals.” I had not read “Vandals” until recently as part of this project with Betsy. I was missing out. I’ve reread it a few times and I’ve been amazed and shocked while looking through its many layers.

The story begins with a seemingly straightforward letter. Bea Doud (we’ve met a few of the Douds in prior stories) has just lost Ladner. She met Ladner later in life, after a series of flings that didn’t go anywhere, and she feels she can live “inside his insanity.” He is a reclusive, ornery veteran who has set up his home almost as a natural preserve, though he is the god who goes in and manipulates everything and who stuffs the animals as if it’s more of a museum. When the story begins, Ladner has died in the hospital, and Bea is left with her thoughts. Her letter is one of appreciation to a young woman named Liza, a former neighbor. When Bea and Ladner rushed away for Ladner’s final visit to the hospital, a blizzard hit their little home out in the country, so Liza drove there to check on things. From Bea’s letter we gather that Liza discovered the home had been vandalized by teens. Liza boarded up the home, and Bea thanks her.

The letter continues on, though, touching on a strange dream Bea has where she goes to a graveyard seven years after Ladner’s death to collect his bones, unsure if this was a pagan act or a Christian one. Many others are also in the cemetery, practically celebrating, “tossing their plastic bags in the air.” As dreams do, things subtly shift around and Bea realizes she is not carrying Ladner’s bones — the bag is too light. No, she’s toting around the bones of someone much smaller. Some around her ask if she has the bones of the little girl, and she doesn’t know whom they’re talking about. She wonders if they’re talking about the little boy, Kenny.

Who is Kenny? What happened to him. She realizes it’s been seven years since “the accident” and says she knows that when the accident happened Kenny wasn’t that little anymore. What is going on? The first time I read “Vandals,” of course, I had no idea. But I was fine with this. Still, I didn’t expect the power and pain that Munro was delicately exploring.

Perhaps realizing she’s touched on something beyond gratitude, Bea never does send this letter to Liza. This is for the best, even if Bea herself never allows herself to fully acknowledge why.

“Vandals” goes around and around the central issue of open secrets, things buried, never mentioned, and the permanent damage such things exact on a long (or short) life. We learn how Bea and Ladner meet. We find out that at the time Liza and Kenny were their young neighbors, and they’d known Ladner for years. Liza and Kenny were welcome to come to Ladner’s whenever they wanted. Though on the outside Ladner didn’t appear friendly to anyone, for some reason he accepts Liza and Kenny almost as part of the household, and he teaches them day after day about the plants and animals and stars.

We don’t necessarily know that anything strange and painful has gone on until Munro goes back and shows us that it is Liza herself who vandalizes the home after the blizzard. When she gets there after the blizzard with her husband Warren (a name that continues to suggest a kind of wild, reclusive space), things are okay. Then Liza starts breaking things, and Warren, probably not understanding why but happy for a bit of chaos, joins in.

Again, on a first read you just have to kind of go with it. Most of what we’ve seen till that point suggests this comes out of the blue. But slowly and with extreme subtlety Munro lets us know that this is just one act of vandalism that is just the barest shadow of truly horrific acts of desecration and destruction that have taken place in the past and permanently altered Liza.

Ladner is not who Bea thinks he is. But it’s clear even Bea know this. Her letter of appreciation must also be one of apology, an attempt at expiation. She has made such an attempt before by paying for Liza to go to college. She knows the open secret — that Ladner sexually abused Liza for years, a maybe Kenny too; at the very least, Kenny was a witness. And the topography of Ladner’s land is a complicated web of delight and pain, education in the worst ways:

Here are the scenes of serious instruction where Ladner taught them how to tell a hickory tree from a butternut and a start from a planet, and places also where they have run and hollered and hung from branches and performed all sorts of rash stunts.

These are the explicit memories Liza recollects as she walks Ladner’s land. But here she is sensing the worst memories almost more than recalling them:

And places where Liza thinks there is a bruise on the ground, a tickling and shame in the grass.

And just look at this terrible scene of shame Liza feels though she has done nothing wrong:

When Ladner grabbed Liza and squashed himself against her, she had a sense of danger deep inside him, a mechanical sputtering, as if he would exhaust himself in on jab of light, and nothing would be left of him but black smoke and burnt smells and frazzled wires. Instead, he collapsed heavily, like the pelt of an animal flung loose from its flesh and bones. He lay so heavy and useless that Liza and even Kenny felt for a moment that it was a transgression to look at him. He had to pull his voice out of his groaning innards, to tell them they were bad.

Ladner has, it seems, been doing this for years before Bea comes along. They first met Ladner when they were seven and eight. Going to her dream, and the bag of bones that turn into both Liza and Kenny, it seems Bea knows but doesn’t accept what she knows. That she couldn’t send the letter suggests she knew even more than that. Does she also know who vandalized the home? Probably. Is she also a bit more at peace now that Ladner is dead and gone? It’s much more complicated than that. Others see her as if she has drifted off and is in a steady decline. To her, though, her last years feel “sadly pleasurable, like a convalescence.”

What a phenomenal exploration of pain and open secrets and the desire to ignore them, as well as the lifelong impact of each. Now, on to Betsy’s fantastic analysis of Bea’s decision to withdraw and ignore what’s going on right in front of her.

Betsy

I

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]I[/fusion_dropcap]n her great 1981 book, Father-Daughter Incest, American psychiatrist Judith Herman discusses the way in which a certain kind of parental relationship fosters the possibility for incest. The authoritarian father imposes an imbalance of power on the family, and either out of fear or choice, the submissive mother withdraws.

Instead of prohibiting seductive or sexualized behaviors on the part of the father, mothers resist “seeing” the open secret which is hidden in plain sight. Herman delineates the multiple abuses taking place: the seduction, the physical abuse and the secrecy imposed on the child by the father; the lack of protection, solace, or action from the ineffectual mother; the lack of help from any quarter; and the active denial by various elements in society that such a thing could ever happen.

Herman posits that recovery for the daughter begins with a “safe therapeutic place.”

Some of Herman’s critics attacked the sexual politics implicit in her therapeutic theory. These critics claimed that reliance on the feminist position — that an authoritarian, paternalistic family structure is the precursor to incest — invalidated her argument. In effect, the critics denied that such a pattern existed.

Herman’s book has been in print for almost 40 years, however, and it maintains its magisterial lead in the research into father-daughter incest.

II

Open Secrets, the collection of stories published by Alice Munro in 1994, addresses the way women endure and survive the various kinds of paternalistic, entitled, and authoritarian mistreatment of women and girls by some men and some elements of society.

“Vandals,” the last story in Open Secrets, investigates the assault and rape of two children and the course of their lives post-trauma. This story is Munro’s assay into what incest might look and feel like, although in this case, the mother and daughter are a constructed relationship rather than a biological relationship. The advantage of this design is that the story gives us, through the real father and the adopted “father” and through the dead real mother and the barely present adopted “mother, a deeper sense of profound neglect and equally profound refusals “to see.” This is what predation requires.

“Vandals” also deepens the horror of the abuse by making the objects of rape not only the girl but also her brother. The horror of the abuse is additionally deepened by Munro’s flat methods of story-telling. Grandiosity of any kind does not suit Munro. Instead, she depends upon the ordinary strangeness of life to make her points.

Liza and Kenny are two kids who live out in the bush with their neglectful, widowed father. They seek out the strange man across the way, the man who lures children onto his property with peculiar stuffed animals that he has killed and stuffed himself. Thus he is much like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, although what Liza and Kenny are hungry for is not food but attention, and in Liza’s case, learning. Ladner taught them a lot about science. But he also taught them a lot about selfishness, seeing as he regularly abused them. There were places in the woods where Liza saw “a bruise on the ground” because of the “secret life she had with him.”

What is your way out of sexual predation? One way is for society to intervene. But we know that society will not intervene. A local school principal has gone out to Ladner’s to see if he will allow some kids to visit him. Ladner is admired by the establishment, the way Thoreau was admired or the way a priest is admired. This principal wanted to bring kids to Ladner.

Another way out of sexual predation is for an adult to intervene. But we see that Bea has chosen Ladner without any question regarding these children he has hanging around. Bea has spent so much time drinking and having affairs that children are not something she’s given any thought to. She doesn’t question in any way what these kids are doing hanging out with Ladner. What she sees is a rigid locked man whose immense “blocks of solid darkness” will provide her with the threat and structure that will keep her away from bars, keep her away from the men who tempt her.

Bea, as Liza says, “does not see what she was sent to see.”

Lacking the protections of society or individual adults, what is the way out of the abuse? One way out is suicide, and Kenny’s death by car accident feels close to suicide. Another is the wildness that Liza pursued, like Kenny, until suddenly she was surprised by a safe place – her fundamentalist church and the safety of her fundamentalist husband. “You saved me,” Liza tells her husband.

But Ladner’s predation leaves its indelible marks: terrible anger, terrible constriction, and a kind of death.

III

In the light of the ongoing revelations of the Catholic Church and its predation by and protection for priests, we have the story of Bea and Ladner, the one entitled, and the other, blind.

An online journal called “The Conversation” details the early history of reporting of pedophilia in the Catholic Church (see here).

During the 1980s, victims began to speak out against the church’s systemic attempts to mask the scope of the crisis. In 1984, survivors of Fr. Gilbert Gauthe refused to be silenced by hush money, instead choosing the painful path of initiating public lawsuits in Louisiana. Gauthe ultimately confessed to abusing 37 children.

As these stories became public, more and more victims began to bring lawsuits against the Church. In Chicago, the nation’s first two clergy abuse survivor organizations, Victims of Clergy Sexual Abuse Linkup (LINKUP) and the Survivors’ Network for Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), were created in 1987.

In 1992, survivor Frank Fitzpatrick’s public allegations led to revelations that Fr. James Porter had abused more than 100 other children in Massachusetts. Widespread shock followed at the time as well as after Fitzpatrick’s appearance on ABC’s “Primetime Live,” when news anchor Diane Sawyer interviewed Fitzpatrick and 30 other Porter victims.

I include this lengthy squib for the purpose of establishing the dates: 1984, 1987, and 1992. “Vandals” first appeared in The New Yorker on October 4, 1993. The events detailed here could well be within what Munro knew of pedophilia at the time, especially given Diane Sawyer’s interview in 1992.

IV

“Vandals,” of course, never mentions the Catholic Church, although there are numerous reasons we might associate this story with the church.

First, Ladner’s own name belies his sexuality, suggesting that he is just another boy, not a sexual man, in the same way that celibate priests claim a natural a-sexuality that is in fact mostly unnatural to most men. (In “Spaceships have Landed” Munro admits in Billy Doud that some men are in fact naturally celibate and saintly, but that it is a rare number is born out by the rare number of such men in Munro’s work.)

Second, Ladner, with the signs scattered about his property, claims, like the church, connection to an ancient history and ancient writers, although in Ladner’s case the writers are Aristotle and Rousseau. Curiously, these are writers who have connections to the evolution and byways of church thinking.

Third, Ladner’s taxidermied animals can be seen as a trope for the stuffed shirts of the church, the uniforms, the rituals and the dogmas of the church, all of which can  represent both lure and safe haven for certain kinds of people.

Fourth, Ladner’s learning is a lure for children just as the schools of the church have been a lure for parents and children for centuries.

Fifth, there is the magisterial setting of Ladner’s land, which Liza describes as a different world, in places as “solemn as a church”:

[W]hen you cross the road . . . when you cross into Ladner’s territory, it’s like coming into a world of different and distinct countries. there is the marsh country, which is deep and jungly, full of botflies and jewelweed and skunk cabbage. A sense there of tropical threats and complications. Then the pine plantation, solemn as a church, with its high boughs and needled carpet, inducing whispering. And the dark rooms under the downswept branches of the cedars — entirely shaded and secret rooms with a bare earth floor. In different places the sun falls differently and in some places not at all. In some places the air is thick and private, and in other places you feel an energetic breeze. Smells are harsh or enticing. Certain walks impose decorum and certain stones are set a jump apart so that they call out for craziness. Here are the scenes of serious instruction where Ladner taught them how to tell a hickory tree from a butternut and a star from a planet, and places where they have run and hollered and hung from branches and performed all sorts of rash stunts. And places where Liza thinks there is a bruise on the ground, a tickling and shame in the grass.

Munro specifically mentions that Ladner’s land can be as “solemn as a church” and that the smells can be “enticing” or “harsh,” as can be true in an old cathedral, with the dank cellars or the batshit in the ceilings or with the covering enticements of incense. There are the jewels of the “jewelweed” and the flies that naturally infest the dead bodies that are brought to the church.

Sixth, there is the actual sexual predation, which Liza describes as a “bruise on the ground,” and which she details thus:

When Ladner grabbed Liza and squashed himself against her, she had a sense of danger deep inside him, a mechanical sputtering, as if he would exhaust himself in one jab of light, and nothing would be left of him but black smoke and burnt smells and frazzled wires. Instead, he collapsed heavily, like the pelt of an animal flung loose from its flesh and bones. He lay so heavy and useless that Liza and even Kenny felt it was a transgression to look at him.

Seventh, there is Ladner’s open mocking of Bea, something that Liza feels keenly as a devastating humiliation, and something that is mirrored in the attitude that the church has to ordinary, non-divine women, in that they are not allowed to be priests or to participate in the holy rituals of the church.

Eighth, there is the pay-off intended to obtain the victim’s silence. In “Vandals,” Bea gives Liza money to go to college. Given what sexual predation does to people and given that what Liza needed was not more learning but real love and affection, Liza did not last long at college. The church is known for paying off its victims.

Ninth, there is the tangential connection between the church and “Vandals” through the use of the name Beatrice. Dante, in the 1200s, created a platonic ideal of divine love and grace in Beatrice, who was both a real girl his own age he had met at nine and whom he saw only a couple of times before she died in her twenties. She was someone he could have never married, given the marriage customs of the time, but given his life as a writer, she evolved in his imagination into a platonic ideal of divine love and grace.

Munro’s Bea is a truncated version of idealized love. She is not surrounded with divine light. Instead, she buzzes. Although Liza loved Bea as Dante loved Beatrice, Bea is completely incapable of saving the two children. Later, Liza realizes:

Bea could have spread safety if she wanted to. Surely she could. All that is needed is for her to turn herself into a different sort of woman, a hard-and-fast, draw-the-line sort, clean-sweeping, energetic, and intolerant. None of that. None of that allowed. Be good. The woman who could rescue them — who could make them all, keep them all, good.

What Bea has been sent to do, she doesn’t see.

Tenth, Liza is compelled to make an offering to Bea, a sacrifice. Liza gives Bea a gift, an earring that had belonged to her mother, in hopes that it would erase the humiliation that Bea had just endured from Ladner, and in hopes that it might inspire in Bea the love that Liza needs. But when Ladner just remarks, “You could wear it in your nose,” Bea was silent, because she had maybe “forgiven Ladner or maybe made a bargain not to remember” her humiliation.

And finally, the worst of all: there is the effect of Ladner’s abuse and Bea’s refusal to see. The abuse lingers in the mind long after it is done:

P.D.P. [Pull down your pants]

Squeegey-boy.

Rub-a-dub-dub.

[Ladner] had to pull his voice out of his groaning innards, to tell them they were bad.

He clucked his tongue faintly and his eyes shone out of ambush, hard and round as the animals’ glass eyes.

Bad-bad-bad.

This is the learning that Liza and Kenny really learned. That they were bad.

V

How do girls and women survive childhood sexual predation? Note that Kenny does not survive.

Herman theorizes that girls and women can survive sexual predation if they are given a safe place. Munro supplies that with Liza’s marriage to Warren and her submission to the fundamentalist church.  Liza says to Kenny: “You saved me.”

Munro notes, however, the legacy of violent anger that victims must control. Liza, given the opportunity by Bea to go up to Ladner’s old house in the bush, ostensibly to “check” on it, instead trashes it. In a fit, she breaks the stuffed animals and scatters the pieces, strews papers all over the floor, throws flour and pours maple syrup. The place is a mess. Kenny joins in a little, getting out a bottle of ketchup. Liza takes over, however, and she uses the ketchup to write:

The wages of sin is death.

Liza vandalizes not just Ladner’s house, however, but also the church itself. In his letter to the Romans (6:23), Paul actually says:

For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Paul, fairly or unfairly, is the writer most associated in the church with the hatred of women. Liza is commenting on Ladner’s death and the punishment that he deserves, but she is also commenting on her own state of grace (despite the crime of vandalism), given her recent embrace of Christianity. The fact is, through Ladner’s abuse, Liza’s rightful nature has been removed, much the way Ladner had remove the innards of the once living animals.

In her anger, Liza out the idea that there might be a “gift of God” of life.

Liza’s innocence and natural purity has been removed and she has been stuffed instead with an unnatural sense of “bad-bad-bad” and the idea she must be “saved” from herself.

VI

Munro’s art and mastery are such that the reader’s first encounter with the story is a profound sense of the alien.

Due to the art of the story, the first thing you think of is not the Catholic Church and its predatory priests and its long history, like Bea, of looking the other way. Your first reaction is to marvel at the gothic strangeness of the tale and to wonder what it was you had just brushed up against.

These tropes that create the profound strangeness — taxidermy, the divination of bones, the use of “signs,” the interest in philosophy — would all make productive long papers, as would the way Munro has structured the story: four parts, the first from Bea’s point of view, and the last three from Liza’s. The structure, which depends upon an omniscient narrator, moves slowly through profound strangenesses to the final revelations.

But I would close instead with homage to a specific realm of Munro’s mastery, that of her ability to depict the language and thoughts of girls and young women, especially her ability to describe the indescribable: seduction, threat, predation, assault, and the attempted destruction of key parts of the self.

“Vandals” is a magisterial story of great reach and almost unfathomable effect: it has an immense philosophic reach, it questions the church, it is grounded in real people, it deals with the contemporary issue of pedophilia, it explores the way trauma torques, scars, and destroys, and it gives the territory of male entitlement real reach.

“Vandals” posits that pedophilia is the theft of self, as if what we are really talking about when we discuss incest or child abuse is the seizure of self and the replacement of a sense of self with stuffing, leaving the children to become dead-men-walking, only unnatural remnants of the natural adults they should have been.

Perhaps the real majesty of this story is that it says all it has to say and still retains, at the end, almost as much mystery as it started with. We do not know why Bea is so damaged; we do not know what Kenny ever really thought; we do not know what caused Ladner to do as he did; we do not know what becomes of Liza or whether she ever is able to see that it is not she who was ever bad-bad-bad.

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“Spaceships Have Landed”
by Alice Munro
from Open Secrets

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Trevor

Once again Alice Munro introduces us to a character in the first sentence and then backs off entirely, presenting a scene in which the character plays no part and then goes on to slowly reveal the character through the eyes of others. The character in this case is Eunie Morgan:

On the night of Eunie Morgan’s disappearance, Rhea was sitting in the bootlegger’s house at Carstairs — Monk’s — a bare, narrow wooden house, soiled halfway up the walls by the periodic flooding of the river. Billy Doud had brought her.

We wander about Monk’s for seven pages before we hear about Eunie Morgan again. At that point, the narrative still doesn’t let us know much about Eunie herself. Instead, we follow her worried mother as she wakes realizing she hasn’t heard Eunie come back in the house. She gets her husband out of bed as well, and they search, but to no avail.

Even after this search it’s a long time before Munro lets us know just what is going on with Eunie (this is not a story where all we know is that she’s gone). Through the pages we see her and Rhea playing together as children, and the portrait we get is of a lower-class girl who doesn’t quite fit in and who doesn’t quite know why. She particularly doesn’t fit in with the likes of Billy Doud, whose family is doing quite well in Carstairs since their factory is booming.

The story goes around and around, in and out of these relationships (there are more characters than usual for Munro). Spaceships? Kind of. It’s interesting. Though, to be honest, right now I’m not such a great fan of “Spaceships Have Landed.” It feels much more like a general portrait of a small town and lacks much of the interior drama I love in Munro’s work; it’s there, for sure, but I feel this story meanders a lot and is the weaker for it. It was the only story in the collection that was rejected by The New Yorker. However, it was published by The Paris Review. I decided to read that version to see if it helped me find a way into the story.

It didn’t change my mind. Instead, what I found particularly interesting was the difference between the version published in Open Secrets and the original version published in The Paris Review. They aren’t too different, but there is one major difference. I mentioned up above that the story — as we find it in the book — begins with a single hook about Eunie’s disappearance before veering off in the same sentence into the bootlegger’s for a detailed panorama focused more on Rhea and Billy Doud. With Munro’s go-ahead, George Plimpton cut that entire section when he published it in The Paris Review. Consequently, the magazine’s version begins with a stronger hook: the section when Eunie’s mom wakes up and realizes she has not heard Eunie come back in and awakens her husband to start a search.

I get why Plimpton started there. Conventionally, if we’re looking to pull the reader in, it’s the stronger start, really honing in on the disappearance rather than looking away at a group of people at Monk’s. Yet when Munro published Open Secrets she put the lengthy section at the bootleggers back. Clearly she had something else in mind with this story, and, other than in a clause that isn’t even the focus of the sentence — albeit the first clause of the story — starting with Eunie’s disappearance wasn’t the way to get what she wanted.

I searched to see what I could learn and found a relevant passage in Robert Thacker’s Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (which is where I learned that it was Plimpton himself who axed the bootlegger section prior to publishing the story in The Paris Review), and Thacker does shed some light on what Munro was up to here: she wanted to move away from what happened to what may have happened.

She certainly does a lot of that in this story and throughout Open Secrets. It’s one of the central strengths of this collection. I think that’s one reason we so often see our central characters through the eyes of others. Munro doesn’t necessarily want us to know just what the central character is thinking, just what is motivating her. She wants us to experience what may have happened through the biased perspective of a bystander, sometimes many bystanders.

But I’m not entirely sure that is a strength of “Spaceships Have Landed.” We are around when Eunie returns the next morning, and no we cannot fully trust the story she has to tell, leaving us somewhat in the “what may have happened territory.” Rather, I think “Spaceships Have Landed” is much more about Carstairs itself, the town where this and a few other Munro stories take place. I think that’s why Munro wants to start with the vivid scene at Monk’s, where no one even knows about Eunie’s disappearance. In this story we again see the Doud family we’ve come to know a bit in “Carried Away” and will see again in “Vandals.” I think “Spaceships Have Landed” is as much about putting this town and some of its people on paper as it is about having us explore any “what may have happened.” While the questions are there, they are overshadowed by all of the details we get elsewhere.

I’m still open to seeing this story from a more promising perspective, so please share your thoughts.

Betsy

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]I[/fusion_dropcap]n “Spaceships Have Landed” there are more than a dozen women, rich and poor, smart and not so smart, loud and silent, free and not free, good and not so good. That one has sought refuge (or is imprisoned) in a hospital and another is pimped out by her husband is telling of the boxes women endure; that one owns a factory and is known as “that Tatar” and another owns almost nothing, has visions, seems a-sexual, and is as good as a saint is also telling, and is perhaps the meaning of the story.

That Rhea outgrows her two friends and leaves them behind, that Rhea betrays one of them, that Rhea runs away and abandons her paralyzed mother, and that Rhea and her husband, between them, have had fifteen lovers is all extremely sad and part of being a woman of her time.

Most compelling to me in “Spaceships have Landed” is the tale of “The Two Toms.” When Rhea is a girl, she has a brief friendship with Eunice when every day all summer they play a game they call the Two Toms. They are not girls any more — they are boys — and they are wild. That Rhea has chosen “Tom” as a name for them is clearly derived from the yowling freedoms of the huge tom cats that probably populate the neighborhood. The girls (“the Two Toms”) play down by the river, they have enemies whom they defeat, they take captives, and they are all-powerful. They are boys.

Then they grow up, and their choices are limited: wild glove factory girl, lover, wife, pimped-out-prostitute-wife, daughter, betrayer, paralytic, Tatar, saint. In fact, most of these choices involve limits and paralysis of one sort or another. The role of the saint, the necessity of saints, is, in Alice Munro, problematic. Most of Munro’s women run from the role. But one of Munro’s most powerful stories is “A Queer Streak.” The Violet of that story is a sister to the Eunice of this story — both are saints who save their families, both are tantalizingly good, and both, in the end, despite pain and sacrifice, end up with loyal men.

The completely surprising thing about this story is that Billy Doud, the scion of the piano manufacturer, is the male version of the saint. In his peculiarities, we see Munro make a tip of the hat to the fact that not all men fit easily into the mold of a “Tom.” The difference is such men are simply odd, not mad. He is pre-occupied, somewhat of a drinker, not very interested in women, and adopts the un-moneyed life of the modern-day savior — the one whose jobs had “something to do with schizophrenics or drug addicts or Christianity.” That he marries Eunice, who is so much a girl of the very wrong side of the tracks, is also an act of rescue. But of course, the two of them are peas in a pod — a-sexual and visionary.

The territory of marriage is a constant exploration for Munro: from the wilderness of Annie McKillop’s marriage, to the fifteen lovers inhabiting Rhea’s marriage, to the sexual slavery of Mrs. Monks, to the gray paralysis of Rhea’s parents’, to the a-sexual union of the two saints — Billie and Eunice.

Madness and the false assignation of which is also a theme in Munro: that it is sometimes a woman’s only choice. The kind of woman who might be assigned the diagnosis of mad is one who withdraws, or one who has visions, or one who thinks, or one who wants to understand. Violet in “A Queer Streak” has a vision, Annie McKillop of “A Wilderness Station” has a kind of far-sighted vision, and poet Almeda Joynt Roth of “Meneseteung” has a drug induced vision and makes choices that appear “mad,” and she is not the only madwoman in that story. Eunice, Annie, and Almeda are also all sisters under the skin, seeking some kind of alternate life where they can be most alive, and yet to most other people they appear either mad or, at least, touched. In Annie McKillop’s case, of course, she declares herself mad in order to obtain safety from the man who might possibly kill her. In “Spaceships,” Rhea provides the counterpoint of the woman who is completely embedded in contemporary life, and for whom life is complex, tumultuous, and also painful. She has “freed” herself of her invalid mother and also freed herself her pre-occupied and somewhat a-sexual boyfriend — but when she runs away with her girlfriend’s boyfriend and is no one’s saint, she must also endure the complexities of her decision.

“Spaceships Have Landed” is filled with memorable visions for the reader, with vivid characterizations that function like icons.

But as a story, there is a kind of stasis to it. It’s like a Breughel painting, a portrait of the world of women, and the women — all except the saintly, a-sexual, good Eunice — are frozen in position, even when they run away.

As a story, I prefer “A Queer Streak” or “Meneseteung.” But as a painting, “Spaceships Have Landed” succeeds, given Eunice’s iconic, spiky, white-blond appearance, and given Billy’s good looks, monkish refusals, and saint’s obedience.

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“A Wilderness Station”
by Alice Munro
from Open Secrets

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Trevor

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]T[/fusion_dropcap]his is one of my favorite Alice Munro stories. It’s complex and rich and exciting. Here Alice Munro goes out into the wilderness of Canada in 1852 and shows us the survival of a woman who, at first, sits on the periphery of other narratives, unable to speak for herself until the end of the story. Still, by that time we recognize this rich, sympathetic character, even if her own accounts are contradictory.

This woman is Annie Herron, née McKillop. Our first glimpse of Annie is in a letter written by a woman who runs a girl’s orphanage in Toronto (the entire story is told through letters or other primary documents). She is responding to an inquiry from a Simon Herron, a young man making his way in the rugged frontier, who apparently wants a wife and thought of the orphanage as a kind of shop. The matron doesn’t seem shocked by this and gives him some recommendations as if they were products, even if she can say that it is for the girs’ own good: “a marriage to a likely man would probably be preferred to a lifetime of such work.” Here’s what Simon Herron learns of Annie:

The other girl, Miss McKillop, is of a more durable constitution though of lean frame and not so good a complexion. She has a waywardness about one eye but id does not interfere with her vision and her sewing is excellent. The darkness of her eyes and hair and brown tinge of her skin is no indication of mixed blood, as both parents were from Fife. She is a hardy girl and I think would be suited to such a life as you can offer, being also free form the silly timidness we often see in girls of her age.

The life Simon has to offer Annie is a life of hardship, at least at the onset. He and his little brother George are taming the harsh land, and really Simon just wants a wife who will tend to everything he thinks a wife should tend to while not complaining.

It doesn’t quite work out that way. We learn in the book’s second section, an excerpt from the Carstairs Argus, written by George Herron fifty years later, that Simon did indeed marry Annie in the winter of 1852 but Simon was dead by early April. This account is written close to the end of George’s own life. He’s been a successful man in the region, and shortly after he wrote this recollection he suffered a stroke that left him unable to talk. The primary story he tells is how in early April 1852 he and his brother went to clear trees. Simon, unfortunately, was struck in the head by a large branch and was killed instantly. Annie garners some mention in this excerpt. George tells how she helped him clean Simon. That’s about it, other than this throwaway line toward the end of the account:

My brother’s wife did not continue in this place but went her own way to Walley.

It’s not quite that simple, though, and as the story continues Munro lays one letter on top of another, developing a fascinating account of the relatively silent Annie. At first, we continue to hear about Annie from others. When she goes back to Walley, she goes to be thrown in the jail, or, as it was spelled there at the time, the gaol. The local reverend is perplexed by her. She showed up saying she’d murdered her husband.

Did she? Well, we do get her confession, but it seems unlikely. Another spectator, someone who knew slightly of the situation out in the wilderness, writes back to the reverent to tell him he didn’t believe she did anything of the sort, and that he believed the account as George and Annie had once given it: Simon was killed by a tree branch.

Why, then, does Annie confess to the murder? What is going on between her and George? Can we know the truth, in the end, since all we are presented is a series of writings (nowhere in this story does an omniscient narrator help us with transitions or tell us how to feel)? Most of these are second-hand accounts. The accounts we get from George and, eventually, Annie actually tell three versions of Simon’s death. At the end, we see some documents and another letter, from someone who knows very little about what happened in 1852, going to the Queen’s University at Kingston Department of History in 1959.

Though we can wonder what really happened, and I think Munro is suggesting relative unknowability, we eventually see the puzzle pieces fit together, showing us a picture of abuse, fear, neglect, and escape from one of life’s wilderness stations.

There is a secret between George and Annie, and though they don’t see each other for fifty years following the death of Simon, that secret influences each of them. It’s lovely to see Annie have the upper hand in the end.

Betsy

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]I[/fusion_dropcap]n “A Wilderness Station” Alice Munro sets herself several very difficult challenges. 

First, the 35-page story spans over a hundred years, from 1852 and 1959.  

Second, it depends solely upon eleven letters written by six individuals, with an embedded comment by a seventh, and a memoir published in the fiftieth anniversary edition of the Carstairs Argus. It is an epistolary story. It is a story of what historians call “original documents.” There is no narrator. Or, conversely, there are eight narrators.

The third challenge of the story is a setting which includes Toronto, the Carstairs that existed in 1852, the one that existed in 1907, the county of North Huron, Walley in general and the Walley Gaol in particular, the Herron homestead, and the Queen’s University History Department in 1959. Perhaps a better way to express it is that the story takes place in the arenas of the family, the state, the church, the university, the whiskey-bar, and the wild. 

An additional and stunning aspect of the setting is the Stanley Steamer owned by a young woman in 1907 and the impression she and it made on everyone who saw them. One might say that the Steamer was in this story, in 1907, the setting of the future made visible.

Without a doubt, however, the story is also in the world of ideas. A Scottish minister says: 

This world is a wilderness, in which we may indeed get our station changed, but the move will be out of one wilderness station into another.

The story could be investigated as a discussion of history and the way history depends upon original documents to ferret out the truth. The story demonstrates that if one document is missing, one version of the truth would not be quite as true, or it would not be so fleshed out, or it could be completely off the mark. But I leave that approach for someone else to write. 

(And here I admonish you to stop and read the story if you have not done so yet.) 

The story could be investigated from the point of view of children’s rights, orphans’ rights, women’s rights, or women’s emancipation, or the rights of jail-keepers and doctors — all in the period in Canada between 1852 and 1907. One could ask, when women got the vote, did they go from one wilderness station to another? Or one could investigate the use of time, setting or characterization.

Or one could very productively look at the symbol of the “gaol” and the irony that a woman would be safer in a jail than on the outside, or the irony that a woman who has already experienced the jail of the orphanage and the jail of her marriage would ultimately be safer in gaol. To a degree, the story reminds me of The Scarlet Letter and its ministers and jails and seamstresses and good works. 

But I am more interested in the issue of insanity, and how men seem, in their various quests, unquestionable, while women are easily deemed insane or unstable. In particular, this story continues a long inquisition by Alice Munro into the unreliability of the medical treatment available to women, especially the psychological evaluation of women. The blaming of women for men’s or society’s insanity is a wilderness station of immense bleakness. 

It’s January, 1852. The story opens with a letter being answered. A young man of about twenty has communicated with the Matron of the House of Industry (or the poorhouse for orphan girls) to ask if she can send him a wife. What we do not find out until later is that this young man, Simon Herron, cannot read or write himself. We also do not find out until later that he is violent when pushed, and he feels pushed often. His personality seems to require utter control of himself, and his childhood having involved what amounts to slavery, he is convinced he has the right to be in utter control of others. He seems to have a horror of being indebted to anyone. We learn later that he is hermit-like in his desire to withdraw from society, having no interest in cooperation or friendship with a neighboring family of homesteaders. He, like his fifteen-year-old brother, is an orphan, and he has struck out for the bush to make his fortune. But his entire future hangs on this one thing: that he has a tendency toward entitled, cruel and impulsive acts of violence.

Later, we learn from Simon’s brother George that very shortly after they began their homesteading in the wild, Simon decided that he needed a wife. The wife would:

cook and do for us and milk a cow when we could afford one. […] He wanted one between eighteen and twenty-two years of age, healthy and not afraid of work and raised in the Orphanage, not taken in lately, so that she would not be expecting any luxuries or to be waited on and would not be recalling when things were easier for her.

Note the contempt; note how not even respect enters in at all. Love and cherish are outliers, in the manner of Saturn’s moons in relation to us. The girl will be a furnishing, an object, a machine, a thing of no report, except if she should become a problem, a problem which Simon already envisions: that she would recall when “things were easier for her.” She should be merely dumb and grateful for the great favor he has done her. But I go on.

Possibly, some of the way the wilderness is exceptional was communicated to the Matron. We do not know. In the reply that the Matron writes to Simon, she seems uninterested in what he might actually be like. What is clear is that she wants to get the girl off her hands. There is an absentee landlord aspect to her words and deeds. There were a lot of orphans in Canada in 1852. There are four orphans alone in this story. That’s a lot of dead weight, unless you can at least put it to work.

And some of the orphans cannot be put to work. One of the orphans, in fact, has consumption and is deemed a poor bet for marriage and all its work.

The Matron wants to get a girl off the dole. The young man wants a slave. Neither society nor men come off well in this picture.

Not too long after, Annie McKillop, not soft, not plump, not consumptive, and neither lazy nor stupid, arrives at the homestead, duly married to Simon. She reveals to the little brother that “she had never imagined so much bush.”

By that we are invited to imagine the wilderness and its challenges, none of which had been shared with her, given that, as an orphan, she has about as much status as a chair. Or less.

By April, her husband is dead, ostensibly killed by a widow-maker while logging in the woods, but in reality killed by a hatchet wielded by her husband’s younger brother. The murder had occurred in the midst of a morning’s terrible work.

The husband, we learn, has been beating his wife for nothing, or for petty annoyances. He gets “a bad look” when he is about to attack her. He has also been beating the little brother, and on this day George had had it and killed his older brother, the (insane) tyrant. By this time we see that the wilderness has driven them all half out of their minds.

While Annie had no recourse against her violent husband and no one else to depend upon, it seems that George had made fast friends with a big homesteading family.

Seeing that the neighboring big-hearted family is his way out, George acts. He thinks he will be able to keep the murder a secret. They are in the middle of nowhere, and stranded because of an April snowstorm. In fact, George has probably already deduced that the ground has thawed enough to bury Simon. He takes his chance and gives Annie the story about the falling section of tree.

But Annie’s diligent. While making a shroud for Simon, she realizes his head has been cleaved by a hatchet. What now? She’s aware that the boy has committed a murder. Here’s a complicated problem that Annie solves, step by clever step. First, she calms him down with a bible-reading game that convinces him God has accepted his confession.

She fearlessly adopts the role of comforter, minister, and source of forgiveness. They bury the body, they tell their lie to the world, everyone buys it, and they make it through the next few weeks.

But George gets cosseted and then taken in by the neighboring family, the Treeces. Life is so promising within their care that suddenly George has a lot to lose. He has so much to lose that he becomes very fearful of Annie revealing him to be the murderer he is. He is so frightened that his whole demeanor towards Annie changes.

She says: “Then he looked at me for the first time in a bad way. It was the same bad way his brother used to look [and soon] it was never anything but the bad look.”

She thinks that George might now kill her. After all, he killed his brother.

Here we have it. Do you believe her? That she could intuit such a truth from a mere look? A mere tip in the emotional weather?

If you’re a woman, you likely believe her. If you’re a man, it’s a toss-up. Society has declared that women are often unreliable. If the woman in your life is primarily a servant (or a slave), then you don’t believe her. If you believe Annie, what she does next makes sense. If you don’t believe her, it doesn’t. It looks insane.

So now Annie has the same problem that George had had. She is terrified that George might kill her, just the way George was terrified that Simon might kill him. George solved the problem by killing Simon. With Simon out of the way, he might court the Treeces and their beautiful daughter.

For Annie, the solution is not that simple: “I couldn’t find anything to help me wherever I looked.”

(Is this the story of women?) We know that the only person Annie trusts is her friend Sophie from the home. Annie writes to her twice, and no one answers. It’s not that Annie can’t make a friend. It’s that she is so isolated.

It is possible she has cracked under the terrible pressures of the bush. An immigrant, educated Scotsman, a minister, dies from the pressure of the wild, inhospitable bush. Annie speaks of voices and dreaming and having trouble telling the difference between the two. Is this a sign that she is thoroughly insane and belongs in Bedlam? Or is it sensible that fearing murder, with no one to turn to, she has episodic breaks with reality?

To me, her fears are real. The threat of murder is an extremity. I believe her.

She decided she could not stay in the house where she would be cornered. She would hide in the woods. She had her intuition that he was as dangerous as Simon, and she was probably right.

But spend the rest of her life sleeping outside? Spend the winter sleeping outside? Spend the rest of her life in fear of George? Spend the rest of her life considered a crazy old crone?

Curiously, she finally deduces that it is a prison where she will be most safe. So she confesses to killing Simon and begs to be locked up.

A doctor who examines her suggests “she is subject to a sort of delusion peculiar to females, for which the motive is a desire for self-importance.”

The doctor easily dismisses her “confession” and at the same time seems to make no effort to collect information or evidence other than what he is already predisposed to think. He “diagnoses” her as unreliable and in the grip of a delusion.

The Clerk of the Walley Gaol (to which she has repaired to save herself from being murdered by George) acknowledged “that this is truly a hard country for women.” But he also thinks she is insane.

Did Simon beat Annie like a gong? I think so. 

Did she ever wonder if he might kill her? I think so.

Did she truly understand why George killed Simon? I think so.

Was she right that George have murdered her? I think so.

Did she know she might be disbelieved and unprotected? I think so.

As it happened, Annie’s clever ruse worked. She survived, and eventually she ended up being adopted by the Clerk of the Peace and taken into his own home and his own big family as seamstress and general dogsbody. Years later, in 1907, when Annie saw George’s memoir in the Carstairs Argus, she decided it was time to pay a call on George.

In a highly entertaining story within a story. One of the Clerk’s daughters, Christena Mullen, drives Annie cross-country to see George (who is now, like Annie, very old). By now, regardless of his big crime, George has a big history, a big presence, and a big family. But Annie deems herself safe in the daring Christena’s company, and she gets a chance to have the last word. Christena Mullen is the one who had the money to buy the Stanley Steamer and the courage to drive it. They make quite a progress through the countryside over to George’s house.

Annie’s been adopted, too, and saved, too, and now Annie, too, has a “daughter.” George may have been (partially, minus the murder) seen in print in the Argus, but Annie has the last word.

At story’s end, it’s 1959. Christena is sending all the documents to the Department of History, Queen’s University, Kingston. The last word.

Post Script. The United States has been consumed with a he-said/she said story. A woman has accused a candidate for the Supreme Court of having assaulted her when she was 15 and he was 17. A large group of Americans believe the man’s denials, and a similarly large group of Americans believe the woman’s account. The American President has taken it upon himself to mock the woman’s story publicly. To me this current story in the news has to do with two opposing beliefs. One, that a woman has the ability to know the truth and the right to tell the truth. The second and opposing idea is that women make up dangerous stories about men, and are given to (as Alice Munro’s doctor in this story says) “a sort of delusion peculiar to females, for which the motive is a desire for self-importance.”

You be the judge.

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“The Jack Randa Hotel”
by Alice Munro
from Open Secrets

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Trevor

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]T[/fusion_dropcap]his story begins with an airplane making a shaky landing that has all on board a bit on edge before they laugh in relief. And indeed the story itself has the ability to take us from regret and sadness to comedy as Munro focuses on one of the women on the plane: Gail.

Gail, we learn, is on her way to Australia, a place she’s never been. She’s going there now on a bit of a fool’s errand: Will — not her husband, but someone she’d been with for years — left her in Canada to follow a young lover to Australia. Since that time, for Gail, Walley, Canada, has been barely a backdrop:

All the trees and streets in Walley, all the liberating views of the lake and the comfort of the shop. Useless cutouts, fakes and props. The real scene was hidden from her in Australia.

So to Australia she goes because to her that’s where life went. I don’t think she’s thinks she’ll find happiness in Australia. I don’t think she has a real plan to execute when she gets there. It’s simply where the throbbing is, and she must tend to it.

The first third of the story shows a bit of Gail’s life with Will. She runs a shop. He teaches school. As she reflects on this, during the bumpy plane ride, she wonders when it was she lost the upper hand in their relationship, which is such a sad thought: the union as a power struggle, the partner as a slippery opponent to be directed with delicacy and utilized for self-fulfillment. And yet, there next to her on the plane is a couple that looks very familiar. The husband and wife are on their way to Hawaii so the husband can play in a left-handed golf tournament. His wife is there to support him, and there she sits with a headache and regret. And so Gail reflects on what it means to have a relationship at all.

It doesn’t seem like “The Jack Randa Hotel” is going to have much levity. But then Gail arrives in Brisbane, finds Will’s new home, and steals a letter from his mailbox. The letter, it turns out, is stamped “return to sender”; it’s one Will wrote that was sent back to him because the addressee was recently deceased, though Will does not know this. We quickly see he didn’t even know the addressee but sent the letter on a whim. Gail infers from the letter that Will is a bit lonely in Brisbane, a bit out of place in the country as well as in his lover’s young group of friends. Will, you see, not only left Gail in Walley; that’s where his own mother still lives as well. And so Will reached out to the only person in Brisbane with the same last name: Thornaby.

For her part, Gail goes to the recently departed Ms. Thornaby’s apartment, sees it’s up to be leased, and moves into a new home and a new identity. A new identity that feels quite comfortable taking Will down a peg or two. Here’s part of her first hilarious missive as Ms. Thornaby:

You may know that the name comes from Thorn Abbey, the ruins of which are still to be seen in Northumberland. The spelling varies — Thornaby, Thornby, Thornabbey, Thornabby. In the Middle Ages the name of the Lord of the Manor would be taken as a surname by all the people working on the estate, including laborers, blacksmiths, carpenters, etc. As a result there are many people scattered around the world bearing a name that in the strict sense they have no right to. Only those who can trace their descent from the family in the twelfth century are the true, armigerous Thornabys. That is, they have the right to display the family coat of arms. I am one of these Thornabys and since you do not mention anything about the coat of arms and do not trace your ancestry back beyond this William I assume that you are not. My grandfather’s name was Jonathan.

The remainder of the story is a comical — though, under the surface, desperate and very unhealthy — back and forth between Gail and Will, who receives his share of chastisement from this stranger in the letters and gradually comes to understand that something is going on, that perhaps he doesn’t have the upper hand. Gail enjoys the new Gail, or “Ms. Thornaby.”

As a story that moves and entertains, “The Jack Randa Hotel” is a lot of fun. But Munro is always exploring more than she’s entertaining, and “The Jack Randa Hotel” is a rather dark examination of relationships — that “upper hand” — and what brings people together, seemingly against sense. Gail is no one I’d like to trifle with, but she’s an intelligent woman who is willing to go against sense in more ways than one. By adopting a new persona, she can say things to Will she never would otherwise, she can maintain some sense that they are still in a relationship, and she can even hope he might follow her back to Canada.

In the end, we’ve been through quite a bit of turbulence, real turbulence, real risk, and we have to look around and maybe chuckle a bit to find ourselves still in one piece after a brush with the edge. But this is not the end. Not really. That onset of relief, which feels like joy, can dissipate quickly.

Betsy

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]“T[/fusion_dropcap]he Jack Randa Hotel” is so perfect in every way, so entertaining, so funny, so interlocking, so echoing, so various, so changeable, so like life and at the same time so new that I can hardly bring myself to say one single thing about it.

It is the best epistolary fiction I ever read, and I adore epistolary fiction.

It is also a love letter to the way we misunderstand things — the way Gail hears, not once, but twice, “Jack Randa,” as in “randy jack,” when what was actually said was “jacaranda.” The jacaranda is an Australian tree which in the spring blooms a “shade of silvery-blue, or silvery-purple.”

The jacaranda is a color “so beautiful, so delicate that you would think it would shock everything into quietness, into contemplation.”

But if life always knew how to act, that would not actually be life, would it?

Gail mistakes the name of the tree, just as she is mistakes randyness for love, and temporary for permanent, and lasting for fleeting. It is as if the very essence of life is not getting it right. It is as if the condition of life is to not perceive almost anything right.

The story seems to me like a trapeze act or a fleeting blossom: perfect, impossible, full of tricks and daring, each little exquisite maneuver executed and done and over before you realize it, and lasting, in the memory as only an impression of perfection, an impression of life (its speed and fleeting momentariness), with all its mistakes and glory.

Is every sentence perfect? Every shift? Yes.

The story is an entertainment and a hymn: full of sadness and loss and haphazard determination, and funny, very funny, as well as dead-on perfect about men and women. It’s as good as “Wigtime,” except it’s way better.

And that’s all I can bring myself to say, as if to pin it down would kill it, the way the beauty of a gorgeous bug or ephemeral butterfly is nothing to what it was before we put it in the case.

Thanks, Alice. Thanks so much. I love how you can write. You make me laugh.

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“Open Secrets”
by Alice Munro
from Open Secrets

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Trevor

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]I[/fusion_dropcap]n “Open Secrets,” Alice Munro uses a disappearance to explore the introspection — the desire, not just to solve the mystery, but also to find some personal meaning — that goes on in the hearts and minds of those who remain. I’ve written a bit about the “lost girl” plot before, particularly in my review of Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock (here), a fantastic film that famously does not offer any resolution to the central mystery. Similarly, Munro is not interested in letting us know exactly “what happened”; she interested in the ramifications of uncertainty as well as the dark suspicions that reveal much more about the person harboring the suspicions than they do about the suspicious event itself. By keeping the mystery open, the reader is invited to participate in the dark suspicions.

This story begins just after an unfortunate event. Heather Bell, a young woman new to the small town, was out hiking with a group of girls, led by Mary Johnstone. Mary has been leading groups of teen-age girls on this hike every June for decades. Now in her early sixties, the group is not what it used to be. Fewer girls want to attend. It’s not the event it used to be. On this particularly terrible day, though, Heather Bell asked if she could go back to fetch a sweater.

In the old days Miss Johnstone would probably have said no. Get a move on and you’ll warm up without it, she would have said. She must have felt uneasy this time, because of the waning popularity of her hikes, which she blamed on television, working mothers, laxity in the home. She said yes.

Yes, but hurry. Hurry and catch up.

Which Heather Bell never did do.

The character we follow is not Miss Johnstone, though, nor Heather (for clear reasons), nor, even, any of the other girls out on the hike, though we hear from them. Rather, the closest we have to a central character in this story is a woman named Maureen Stephens. One of the first things we learn about Maureen is that she and her husband, a lawyer who has suffered a stroke, do not have children, and that many years prior she was one of the girls on Miss Johnstone’s hiking trip. She is somewhat younger than her husband, and we learn, almost as an aside, how their marriage came about: “She developed the qualities her husband would see and value when hiring and proposing.”

Being a long-time member of the community, even having gone on a hike with Miss Johnstone, and being the lawyer’s wife, Maureen finds plenty of opportunity to hear the various theories surrounding the disappearance of Heather Bell. Strangely, Munro presents some of the details and theories in a kind of song or nursery rhyme throughout the story (the story even begins with one). Here is one that presents a few of the theories:

And maybe some man did meet her there
That was carrying a gun or a knife
He met her there and he didn’t care
He took that young girl’s life.

But some will say it wasn’t that way
That she met a stranger or a friend
In a big black car she was carried far
And nobody knows the end.

As we might suspect, neighbors begin to suspect each other. Behavior that was overlooked before as being simply “strange” now appears more sinister. A suspicion turns into a certainty.

But more interesting even is Maureen’s examination of her own relationship with her older husband, a man she has always been subservient to and who she’s not particularly comfortable with sexually. She can see the side he presents to the world — one of authority and propriety — and she sees the side that comes out in more intimate quarters.

I am still wrestling with more of the story. I’m curious about the connections between the disappearance and Maureen’s own life. I can sense there’s more to it than what I’ve gleaned having read the story a few times. I’m hopeful to learn more, but, of course, that knowledge is not always forthcoming is part of the theme.

Betsy

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]“O[/fusion_dropcap]pen Secrets”, the title story of Munro’s eighth book, is great but demanding. A story purportedly about open secrets remains, in the end, an unsolved mystery. Thirteen-year-old Heather Bell has disappeared while on an overnight hike, and at the end all we know for sure is that she has neither turned up in person nor has her body been found.

One of the reasons the story is challenging is that the reader is impatient for Heather to be found. I notice that on the first reading I wrote on the story’s eighteenth page, “another thirteen pages to go!” The story was developing through many threads, the way life does. I, however, just wanted Heather’s disappearance solved.

Open Secrets: An author whose girls and women run away

At the story’s close, the narrator solves my problem:

Heather Bell will not be found. No body, no trace. She has blown away like ashes. Her displayed photograph will fade in public places. Its tight-lipped smile, bitten in at one corner as if suppressing a disrespectful laugh, will seem to be connected with her disappearance rather than her mockery of the school photographer. There will always be a tiny suggestion, in that, of her own free will.

Thus Munro makes running away a distinct possibility, a choice, a choice made out of necessity, out of your own “free will.” Out on the overnight camping trip (from which Heather disappeared), the girls play truth or dare: “I dare you to run away,” says the text.

What makes it ironic is that Maureen, the housewife through whom we see the story, is someone who should run away. Her husband, the lawyer, has in the past denied her sex, saying it is childish, telling her to “grow up,” which “humiliated” her. It is possible he is the one who gave permission for her to have her tubes tied when she miscarried, perhaps because he wanted to be done with sex with her entirely. It is for sure that since his stroke the lawyer has broken into a habit of bizarre and violent sex in which Maureen is an employee or a slave rather than a beloved partner. Running away, for dutiful Maureen, would be understandable.

Running away is a repeating theme with Munro. Think: “Runaway,” “The Albanian Virgin,” “Train,” “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” “To Reach Japan,” and others. In each case, there are necessary choices to be made, choices which provide for survival, or make it impossible.

The possible violence done to Heather underscores the actual domestic violence done to Maureen.

Open secrets: Sexuality is powerful, and if repressed, it may out itself in weirdness or violence

The provincial society actively denies and represses sexuality. Munro details the wild energy that puberty awakens in thirteen year old girls, and it seems an open secret that girls and women are sexual beings, although society pretends they aren’t and punishes them for it if they are.

Three of the men in this story have weird sexualities, and to further complicate things, all three men are mute in some way. One is surgically muted, one is stroke muted, and one is wife muted.

The surgical mute is an old, voiceless widower, a piano tuner who has ironically lost his vocal cords, and someone who displays women’s underwear around his place. This man seems to try to alert a neighbor to a violent drowning, but due to being mute, he cannot make himself understood, and due to being peculiar, he cannot be trusted.

Another man is a prominent lawyer who has for years denied his wife sex and tells her it’s childish, but after a stroke this same man develops an appetite for raping her. What has he been doing all the rest of the time? Something on the side? A little rape on the side?

A third man seems childish in his appearance, and his childishness is accentuated by the weird way, when holding his wife’s hat in his lap, he strokes the feathers on the hat. This same man is conspicuously involved in hosing off a group of thirteen-year-old girls who suddenly appear in his yard. Turned on by being wet, the girls become Canadian Lolitas. This man, this hose bearer, is conspicuously off on his own the morning Heather Bell disappears.

The open secret with these is that, although their sexualities have been repressed or muted, they are still sexual beings, and the sex, now twisted, still insists on itself.

A case can be made for each of the men (the stroked lawyer, the cancer victim, and the emasculated husband) to have raped and murdered the Heather Bell, but in the end, it is also just as likely that the girl, if attacked, was murdered by a stranger. That the guilt could be smeared so broadly appears to attest to Munro’s belief that sexual repression was both widespread and no good.

How does a society get this way?  

The town cultivates an annual sex education hike for teen girls. The leader of the annual hike is a local unmarried saint who came down with polio while a teenager and was, for a time, in an iron lung. She had a vision that Jesus had appeared to her and told her to get up, get back up to bat, and this appears to have saved her life. The town feels comfortable with the idea that she is the right choice to be their sex educator. The reader gets the idea that this is short-hand for the thousands of battles fought in local school boards regarding sex education, with one side wanting full disclosure about sex to children and the other side wanting religion to do the educating and schools to have nothing to do with it.

The town saint lectures the randy girls that they must guard against the urges of men and boys, thus setting up the ideas that a-sexuality is saintly, that only men have sexual natures, and that it is women who, as lovers and mothers must reign in and control men. That the fourteen-year-old girls are randy and full of themselves and full of rebellious ideas is no surprise to a regular Munro reader. The arc of a woman’s life in Munro is punctuated by a sense of emerging power in teen girls (both sexual and otherwise), the violent attempt by society to root that power out of them, a disastrous marriage made too young, and the grown woman’s eventual reclamation of her autonomy (both sexual and otherwise).

Heather Bell is one of these rebellious teenagers, and the saintly hike leader, now a little on in years, loses control of the situation. Heather runs off, presumably to find her sweater, and she disappears. Precious time elapses while the hike leader pronouncedly ignores her disappearance. She is presumed dead, but to the reader, the possibility that she has merely run away is (at first) just as great. The silence created by her disappearance stands for the way the town itself, the way society itself, tries to mute the citizens of a powerful human expression that is central to its well-being.

An echo of Shirley Jackson

The story has, in its stark weirdness, a similarity to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Both stories present a situation where the whole town seems to look the other way in the presence of wrongful violence. What’s wrong is an open secret, the secret being that they are trying to repress sexual feeling, but sexual feeling will have its way, regardless. (In Jackson, it is not sex that is the open secret but the Holocaust.) In each story, the towns cannot keep themselves from continuing to behave in exactly the same way, year after year. And each story ends with one person being scape-goated. In Jackson’s “The Lottery,” the town chooses someone to stone once a year. In the Munro story, the addled widower is taken off to the asylum, as a means for the town to assure itself that justice has been done — by scapegoat. But in addition, in “Open Secret,” the girl has disappeared, perhaps been raped, perhaps been murdered, perhaps drowned. The open secret in Munro is that all the repression and silence leads in the end to violence, rape, and being muted.

In the meantime, however, Munro has been clear to suggest the girl may have simply run away. Regardless, whatever the ending, the disappearance has somehow been caused by the silence around sex.

An echo of William Faulkner an “A Rose for Emily”

Reminiscent of the town collective consciousness in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” a wily and unpleasant servant in Lawyer Stephens’ house plays the role of the town; Frances listens at doors, retails gossip, is certain she knows what she knows, and she mythologizes. The ballad she writes celebrates both the girl’s innocent death and the fact that no one will ever know the end. The ballad is captivating, and it gets typed up, because the writer wants to get it into the newspaper. She is a kind of seer for the town who rises above mere gossip to give an interpretation, one that posits that it’s equally possible the girl either ran away or that she was murdered. But Frances also romanticizes violence and rape, cementing an attitude that violence and rape are part of an incontrovertible order in which sexuality must be repressed.

This servant who listens at doors is also privy to the sexual violence in the lawyer’s marriage, thus being an exemplar of the fact that it’s an open secret that sex in some households is a violent event. Thus the servant also stands for what children already know, long before the town saint gives her annual lecture.

In the same way, the servant’s ballad serves as an exemplar of all the literature (poetic and otherwise) that accepts sexual violence as a sad fact of life.

An echo of Henry James and The Turn of the Screw

Sexuality is the powerful unnamed evil in The Turn of the Screw. A newly arrived governess tells the story of the death of a child, possibly at the hands of a former governess and her paramour, or at the hands of their ghosts. The reader is also invited to consider whether the governess herself is responsible (either through naiveté or actual derangement) for the child’s death. The reader is invited to decide how much of what the naïve governess sees is true and how likely it is that some initiation into sexuality is the cause of the child’s death.

Similarly, in “Open Secrets,” we are left to decide whether we know who killed Heather Bell or if she died at all. And similarly, repression is clearly an actor in both stories. 

How do we know what we know? Visions, double vision, intuition, and second sight . . .

Visions:

Munro’s town “saint” recovered from polio and is revered for the story she tells of herself, a story which is also a town myth. Mary Johnstone tells how she was impelled by Jesus to get up and walk, a Jesus who appeared to her in a hospital doctor’s guise. Everybody knows it was just a doctor, but the fact that the saint believes it was Jesus is a pleasant and reassuring alternative.

The saint makes it possible for the town to believe two separate and opposing things simultaneously: that Mary Johnstone was cured by modern medicine, and that she was saved by her vision of Jesus. “Thus, they can also believe other separate and opposing things simultaneously, such as knowing that humans are obviously sexual creatures, and believing that it is best to put a tight lid on most sexual desire.”

Seeing Double:

Mrs. Hubbert relays to Lawyer Stephens and his wife how she’d been laid low by a boil, and how she’d taken “a couple of 222s.” This commonly prescribed Canadian drug was a combination of an anti-inflammatory, caffeine, and codeine. Marian describes how she’d been awakened from a drug induced “doze” by the dog barking, which in turn had been brought on by mute Mr. Siddicup out in her yard doing a wild pantomime of someone drowning. After it became clear that Marian could not understand what he wanted, he disappeared, and Marian took a couple more 222s. Here is an example of completely obstructed vision. While Mary Johnstone knew right away that she must respond to her vision of Jesus, Marian Hubbert could not decipher or answer the vision she had of Mr. Siddicup. The opposite of a saint, Marian is a dead vessel, incapacitated by codeine. Only later does she realize that Mr. Siddicup’s pantomime might have had to do with Heather Bell, and possibly, just possibly, her husband and Heather Bell.

Intuition and Second Sight:

Finally, Maureen, through whom we experience the story, has a kind of vision of her own, one we commonly understand as intuition, but one which also seems close to the Gaelic phenomenon known as second sight.

In “Scots Belief in Second Sight,” Emma O’Neill says:

Dr Johnson in his Journey to the Western Isles book (1775) acknowledged that while it was a dying belief among the Lowlanders, the Highlanders still very much held Second Sight to be fact. It is the common talk of the Lowland Scots, that the notion of the Second Sight is wearing away with other superstitions; and that its reality is no longer supposed, but by the grossest people.

How far its prevalence ever extended, or what ground it has lost, I know not. “The Islanders of all degrees, whether of rank or understanding, universally admit it. Except the ministers, who universally deny it.

Strong reasons for incredulity will readily occur. Yet the Second Sight is only wonderful because it is rare, for considered in itself, it involves no more difficulty than dreams.

We learn that Maureen senses that life can have alternative explanations, or that a person lives in the constant shadow of alternative possible lives. She lives with a brutal old man, and at the same time, she can have visions of an energetic young man honoring her with a present. At the same time as she is making custard at the stove, she can also have a vision of terrible clarity and brutality: that she sees a hand being pushed down onto a stove burner. And the reader knows that Maureen is seeing the way the town represses sexuality until it is scarred and twisted. Maureen’s gift is second sight.

Artistic Vision, Intuition, and Second Sight:

While Maureen has visions of both vibrant sexuality and repressed sexuality, and while her “second sight” has the immediate truth of intuition, we have to wonder where the intuition and the inspiration of the artist fall in the spectrum of truth.

Maureen, after all, is not the poet that Frances is.

She may be what her husband called “The Jewel,” but it is Frances who wrote the Ballad of Heather Bell. Munro, as in “The Albanian Virgin,” undercuts the role of the writer. Frances is repellent: mean, disrespectful, and a gossip who listens at doors. But her ballad works. It tells the story and it encapsulates the mystery of Heather Bell — that “nobody knows the end.” Frances can tell her story and can be the artist, precisely because she listens at doors and entertains “far-fetched” gossip.

Maureen, the extraordinary Jewel, is no mere scribbler. For her, “trying to tell” what she sensed and saw is not easy. It’s “startling.” And years later, that long ago moment when she “seemed to be looking into an open secret,” is evasive; she cannot quite remember it.

What Munro is saying about vision and artistic vision is not quite clear either. It is as if Frances is the scribbler, facile and eager, but Maureen is the artist, having to tell, being unable to tell, what it was she saw that day at the stove. Frances gets the romance and pathos of Heather Bell’s disappearance, and she finds the right place to publish: the newspaper. But it is Maureen who “sees” that the sorrow is that of an entire society, a society that, like Marian Hubbert, stops men, stops women, as if they were children, from enjoying sexuality.

Marian Hubbert’s husband had taken the brown feathered hat from Marian that had been bothering her, and he sets it in his lap, and in a pantomime of self-gratification or masturbation, begins to stroke it. Marian, “with a burst of abhorrence” stops him. She “clamped a hand down on his.”

In a mirror of this, Marian sees a hand press another hand down on a burner — a warning.

In silence this is done, and by agreement — a brief and barbaric and necessary act.

So society warps sexuality. It brutally punishes any reliance or expression of its comfort.

Maureen had wondered:

But suppose you did see something? Not along the line of Jesus, but something?

At that, we understand that Maureen suspects that Theo Slater, Marian Hubbert’s husband, may have killed Heather Bell. At the same time, however, we know that what Marian sees is not just the possible guilt of one specific culprit, but the collective guilt of an entire society.

Open Secrets: Church

When the girls gather to go off on their hike, it is in the United Church basement, and their leader is Mary Johnstone, to whom Jesus had once appeared in a vision long ago.  Mary had gotten polio at thirteen or fourteen, and she was in an iron lung.

Jesus said, “You’ve got to get back up to bat, Mary.” That was all. She was a good softball player, and He used language He knew she would understand. Then He went away, and she hugged onto life, the way he had told her to.

Part of her hugging onto life was to accept her role as disciple, or saint (two words that Munro herself never uses). The town accepts Mary Johnstone as a given.

So — she was crazy. But everybody let her talk about Jesus in the hospital because they thought she was entitled to believe that.

And Mary is a kind of disciple. She has supported herself, has never married. And she has “devoted her life to girls,” saying she had “never met a bad one, just some who were confused.”

Where the town may have got it wrong was to abdicate its own role in the care and nurture of its girls. Mary Johnstone is both a pure religious nut and a practical Canadian: she has “hugged onto life”; she preaches, get up and walk, “get back up to bat.” The center of her message and example is completely on target.

But when the town assigns her the role of sex educator, it has gone astray. Mary J. is no Mary Magdalene. Mary J. doesn’t know anything about sex. She may have a calling regarding softball, but she cannot claim any experience or skill at sex. Munro is saying, tongue in cheek, a girl’s only choice is to get up and walk away from Mary as sex educator.

Mary Johnstone is off message; her sanctuary, the church basement, is no sanctuary. Frances, the repellent housekeeper, is right on one count, at least. She doesn’t like Mary Johnstone; she doesn’t like people “who made too much of themselves.”

So Heather Bell is doing what Jesus told Mary J. to do: get up and hug onto life; get up and go; live the life you are naturally good at; run away if you must.

Open Secrets: time and the writer

Maureen Stephens has the Gaelic name and maybe the real gift of second sight.

In kitchens hundreds and thousands of miles away, she’ll watch the soft skin form on the back of a wooden spoon and her memory will twitch, but it will not quite reveal to her this moment when she seems to be looking into an open secret, something not startling until you think of trying to tell it.

And the backbone of the open secret is that when sexual feeling is denied or silenced or brutally punished, it will nonetheless still insist on being expressed, but the expression will be scarred in some way. When sexual feeling is silenced, it becomes ever more difficult to access in any normal way.

Another open secret is that writing and getting it right is not that easy.

It’s a strange story, in that at the time of its writing, the sexual revolution is twenty years in the past.  It’s as if the author, while not in love with all of the results of sexual freedom, wants to remind us of the constraints of the past that made the revolution necessary.

It’s a ghost story — a story with no solutions — and because it has no solutions, it has staying power.

And the artist? There’s gossiping and listening at doors, the way Frances does, and then there’s waiting for inspiration or intuition (or second sight) the way Maureen waits. Time brings you to it, the time it takes to thicken a custard on the stove (forever). I am reminded that Alice Munro has said she’s done some of her writing while waiting for the potatoes to boil. And the intuition can be over in a flash and can be lost over time. Frances, in her speed, gets the pathos and the romance, but completely misses the moral point: that society could be different. The ballad accepts such violence as a part of the human condition.

In her slowness, Maureen — the jewel — “sees something,” something far more complex and elusive than does Frances. Thus does Munro bid us pay attention to the time she takes with writing and the time she has devoted to writing.

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“The Albanian Virgin”
by Alice Munro
from Open Secrets

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Trevor

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]T[/fusion_dropcap]he title character in Munro’s “The Albanian Virgin” is neither Albanian nor a virgin. At one point, she assumes the role of an Albanian man. And, we learn after her introduction, she is actually a fictional character in a story within the story. Indeed, she’s the fictional character in a story being told to our narrator by another woman. Such is the complexity of Munro’s later work. Yet the layers fit together wonderfully. The themes and structure may be complex, but reading it is far from a chore.

The story begins with this story-within-the-story. We step back into Albania in the 1920s to meet a Canadian woman who will be the Albanian virgin. We never know the real name of this woman. When she says it to the Ghegs, they don’t quite understand and call her Lotar. That’s who she is to us as well. She’s with the Ghegs by accident. While she was out on a guided tour of the olive trees, they killed her guide (the guide had killed someone from their group some time before, and he would, in turn, be avenged later). The Ghegs never meant to be burdened with this Canadian woman, but her horse gets spooked and she gets injured. They take her to nurse her back to health.

As I mentioned above, this is how Munro opens the story, but this is actually several layers removed from our narrator, a woman named Claire: “I heard this story in the old St. Joseph’s Hospital in Victoria from Charlotte, who was the sort of friend I had in my early days there.” As is often the case in Munro’s stories, there is another, invisible layer between the action of the story and the narration: some time has passed since Claire heard this story, and she is now returning to it to examine some other parts of her life. Even before she moved to Victoria, Claire had been a Ph.D. student in London, working on thesis about Mary Shelley’s late works, written after “she learned her sad lessons,” and perhaps Claire has learned some more sad lessons as she thinks back on this time in her life.

And quite a time it was, too. A string of sad events, in which Claire played an integral part, Claire is abandoned by her husband and in turn abandons her studies to move to Victoria to start a bookstore.

For her part, Charlotte (doesn’t that sound like a name that could be mistaken for Lotar? maybe?) and her husband handle books. They meet Claire at Claire’s store. Claire attends their home for dinner. Charlotte hopes this story she’s telling Claire can be turned into a successful film.

And so the story goes, back and forth between the past and the deeper past, between fiction and reality, breaking down the barriers between all of these planes to show just how much they influence one another.

Those are not the only barriers being explored or broken through. Each of the women have roles to play. Roles based on gender: Lotar, after all, to avoid being sold into marriage, publicly renounces sex to become a virgin, meaning she could live as an equal with the men: carry a weapon, participate in a blood feud, be served by women, even own and inherit land (but who to pass that land onto?), though she must wear men’s clothes and keep her hair shaved and never go back on her vow. No one thinks she is actually a man, but functionally she is because sex has been taken out of the equation. Sex was the factor that would have lowered her social station.

From one angle, this may look liberating. A woman treated as an equal to the males in a distinctly patriarchal and patrilineal society. What an escape! However, from another, it’s clear this is not true equality. The woman must renounce sex and adopt another, entirely constructed role. This is another prison with no real escape. The motivation for doing such a thing was to escape a variety of fates directed at women. But being a sworn virgin is, itself, another fate solely for women.

This is a fascinating — and real — social construct in Albania (though one that plays out less frequently today). It’s also a fascinating link to the story of Charlotte and, through her, to the story of Claire, herself seeking some kind of fulfillment in a world of damaging social constructs and expectations.

Fitting that this is done in a story that thwarts our expectations so often!

Betsy

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]“T[/fusion_dropcap]he Albanian Virgin” is a stunner. There are flights, leaps, and juxtapositions which entertain, dazzle, and confuse, and the no-end-of-speculation regarding what it all means is one of its rewards.

As always, I cannot imagine you being here, reading what paltry ideas I have to peddle about the story if you have not read the story first. To lay eyes unaware on a world in the Munro galaxy is to be both flummoxed and completely diverted. It is a disorientation devoutly to be desired. The disorientation is a leap central to the experience. So read the story first. That’s a moral choice that’s completely on you. 

Munro almost always leaves enough gaps to keep the reader busy thinking for hours after the book has been closed; surely she enjoys the possibility that readers might converse and disagree regarding what the story might have meant. There’s been no end of speculation about what Henry James really meant in The Turn of the Screw. Same here. Sometimes I believe that James is a primary touchstone for Munro, and “The Albanian Virgin” mimics, in its own way, the Screw’s ghostly unreality.

Five stories run simultaneously: 

• “wracked-up” Claire has fled marriage and graduate work to start up a bookstore in Victoria, all precipitated by an affair she had with a lodger
• Charlotte is a patron/shoplifter in the bookstore whose husband peddles second hand books
• Charlotte has a movie she wants to sell about an American woman who gets kidnapped in the 1920s by an Albanian mountain tribe and who, threatened with being sold into marriage, assumes the life of an Albanian man
• Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein and some later, lesser books which are the subject of Claire’s Ph.D. thesis, provides background and danger
• Will Claire go back to her husband? Will the lodger follow Claire out west? Or neither of the two?
• whew

At the same time, “The Albanian Virgin” investigates numerous ideas: can we escape from roles that society has imposed upon us, and in particular, can we escape our assigned gender roles? Can running away ever be good? Is story-telling inherently thievery? And tangentially, what is happiness?

Before I continue with a serious exploration of a serious story, I want to remark on the wicked wit that permeates this piece. First of all, Alice is making the point that getting a Ph.D. is like being kidnapped by Albanians. I could go on and on about the parallels, but I won’t. Second, she is simultaneously making the point that marriage, especially a marriage made way too young, can be like being kidnapped by Albanians. Ditto on how I won’t beat that dead horse. Third, she is remarking on how being a writer sets you up for all kinds of suspicions, accusations, and flip opinions, such as, you’ve used that thing that I told you in confidence, but that thing that happened to me! You’re nothing but a thief rummaging around in my life! Charlotte, the old, unkempt, Bohemian shoplifter clearly portrays a funhouse version of the responsibilities of the writer. 

One: A Little Background

Women in mountainous Albanian tribes have for a long time had the right to assume the role of a man. They had only to forswear sex for life in front of twelve tribal elders. As a “Sworn Virgin,” a woman could carry a gun, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, own land, and participate in blood feuds. But that list misses the key thing: she did not have to submit to anyone, did not have to be controlled by father or brother or husband or other women or society, and, given that she could carry a gun, did not have to endure being beaten. In Munro’s vernacular, she did not have to surrender.

There is, however, a flip side to being a sworn virgin: the role might not have been a choice; it might have been chosen for her and forced upon her. The family, for example, might not have had a male heir, and they might have assigned this identity to the girl at birth (or later). A Yugoslav movie, Virdzina (1991), explores the plight of such a sworn virgin. The young man/woman falls in love with a man, and her only way out of the role that society has assigned her and the only way to be with the man she loves is to run away. She escapes to the United States with him.

Running away to escape a societal or parental expectation is a common theme in Munro. Running away in Munro involves a lot of breakage and sorrow, but it is seen as a necessary thing, something without which life would be half lived. One can see that Virdzina might have resonated with Munro.

In addition, choices in Munro, especially marriage, are often short-sighted, simultaneously risking disaster as much as freedom. The swapped gender role of the sworn virgin offers a woman heady freedom, but becoming a sworn virgin could also be a trap, in more ways than one. 

In much of Munro, the liberation of women in the 60s via the pill and Betty Friedan (America’s Simone de Beauvoir) offered the same simultaneous possibilities: freedom and disaster.

Two: Shedding an Assigned Role

In “The Albanian Virgin” it’s the 20s, and the Ghegs are a mountain tribe who murder a guide and end up being saddled with an injured American woman. Enmeshed in the laws of the blood feud, the Ghegs must retaliate every time one of their own gets killed. A man can be a marked man from birth. A priest explains:

This would go on, it had been going on for a long time now, there were always more sons being born. They [the Ghegs] think they have more sons than other people in the world, and it is to serve this necessity.

These two sentences incorporate the leaps of illogic that are very common in Munro, but more important, they reflect the belief of provincial peoples that custom is incontrovertible, that custom is destiny. Here, the Ghegs believe that their twin blood feud roles of possible killer and possible victim are the permanent situation into which you are, if a man, born stuck.

In contrast, Lottar, the kidnapped American woman, reverses what looks like destiny and escapes. Although she is tangled up with this tribe, Lottar escapes them several times. First, she becomes a sworn virgin, and then she runs away. Situation, for Lottar, is not destiny.

Munro makes clear early in the story that nothing in life is locked in place:

At one time they were on a boat and she woke up and saw the stars, brightening and fading and changing places — unstable clusters that made her sick.

Munro makes clear that “changing places” is a theme, and although we know that stars move, she also emphasizes that it is very unsettling to perceive the stars as “unstable clusters.” Change, especially changing yourself, can be revolutionary, Copernican, and possibly fatal. Of course, that’s me talking about Munro. Munro only says, with her customary understatement, that the “unstable clusters . . . made her sick.” 

In the course of Lottar’s stay with the Ghegs, she changes places several times. She recuperates, near death, in a dying house. She becomes first an Albanian woman, and then an Albanian man, entitled to live the good life, entitled to the manly privilege of not a lot of work plus fooling around with horses and guns.

While it would be tempting to see “The Albanian Virgin” solely as a story about assigned gender roles, however, I think it is much more fruitful to see it as a story about assigned roles in general, about submitting to a role you didn’t choose, or more important, about passively accepting a role you didn’t fully understand when you chose it.

Sometimes, changing places is what is required for survival, although changing places can be both difficult and dangerous.

Three: Which is it? Shedding an assigned gender role or shedding a role?

Munro has long exhibited an interest in assigned gender role and whether it can be escaped, especially in her early story “Boys and Girls.” Girls and women sometimes cross-dress and pass as men or boys, as in “The Moon Over the Orange Street Skating Rink” and “The Turkey Season.” One of Munro’s key concerns is the assigned gender requirement of women that they submit or surrender, two words that reappear again and again in the stories. While in Munro surrender is often paradoxically necessary in order for a woman to have an authentic sexual experience, continual surrender to a role assigned by society, marriage, or job is something from which a woman may need to free herself.

In order to avoid being sold into a Muslim marriage, Lottar, according to Albanian custom, switches her assigned gender role to male. It is an amusing and fascinating excursion. As a sworn virgin, Lottar is freed from the endless heavy work assigned to the women and is free to smoke, joke around, and live undisturbed. Even so, treachery appears to be right around the corner: she could still be trafficked into a slave-marriage. Lottar escapes from her role as a sworn virgin, and escapes from Albania altogether, with the help of a priest. Merely switching her assigned gender role was not enough, in the end, to assure Lottar either safety or fulfillment.

Munro repeatedly depicts teenaged girls as having an unabashed joy in their emerging power, a power that gets quickly surrendered or drowned and must be, if one is going to survive, reclaimed later in life. In “The Albanian Virgin,” Lottar tries, like a crazed teenager, to experience Albania. She ends up kidnapped. Similarly, Claire appears to have leapt into both marriage and the academic life unprepared. She must jump the false bonds of both wife and student to thrive. It’s important to remember that at the time, being a Ph.D. candidate was essentially switching gender roles. When you hear what her Ph.D topic is (the later, mostly forgotten, novels of Mary Shelley), and when you hear she is more interested in Shelley’s life than this later fiction, it makes sense that she must escape. For Munro (and for Claire), running a bookstore, talking with whomever you like, and reading as you please is a setting of far greater pleasure and power than being submerged in the narrow demands of the university system.

Being freed of certain gender expectations, therefore, can be liberating, but it’s not the whole story. Being free to reject assigned roles in general is the key.

Four: What is happiness?

Another aspect to assigned roles in “The Albanian Virgin” is that Claire runs from an orderly and nurturing marriage into an electrifying affair. Although she dreams of finding a man who is both fatherly and electrifying, she accepts the truth that this is likely impossible, and she ends up with the electrifying lover. Although Alice is elusive on sex, she counts it as one of the key ways a woman can be “known” or “recognized,” and so good sex is central to a happy life. As for Claire, she chooses good sex. Many years later, she describes her partnership with Nelson as happy enough, and passing “in a sort of a blur.” What is key to the story is that in order to be happy enough, Claire had to slip the assigned roles of university and submission to the wrong husband, and it was not easy.

We have been very happy.

I have often felt completely alone.

There is always in this life something to discover.

Here again, there is the illogic of non-sequitur. How can you be very happy with a partner if you often feel “completely alone”? Maybe it is because being completely alone is the human condition. Maybe it is because in order to be happy, you must be free enough to be sometimes left completely alone. Maybe being often free of interference is a necessity to being happy. Maybe being completely alone leaves you free to pursue your own purposes, for instance, without having to submit or surrender to another person’s assigned role for you.

It’s important to note that Munro won her Nobel Prize from the situation-room of housewife, that presumably self-extinguishing assigned role.

Munro makes it clear that escaping an assigned role is not easy. She runs Lottar’s wild story side by side with Claire’s more ordinary story. Lottar’s wild tale of kidnapping, murder, violence, injury, trafficking and isolation runs like a dream mirror of Claire’s story. Thus Munro makes the point that running away from assigned roles may be necessary, but is not as easy as it looks. Seizing control of your own life is a violent affair, and not a simple thing.

But while Lottar’s story emphasizes switching one’s assigned gender role, I think Munro means to address the freedom to abandon any role assigned by society or by a partner. While it might be fun for a woman to try on being a man, the way a couple of girls do in “The Turkey Season,” surviving your life is not as simple as merely shucking an assigned gender role. Survival is shucking submission to any role you either have not chosen or which does not allow you to thrive.

(I am reminded here of the gorgeous Barbara in “Oranges and Apples,” who required the freedom of the housewife that allowed her to read and read, think and think.)

Finally, there is the issue of money and happiness. For Munro, there is poverty and then there is poverty. Grinding poverty often involves the disorganization, isolation, and suffering that devolves from one or more family members being deranged. “A Queer Streak” is an example. A less profound poorness, one that still allows for reading, family, stories, and sharing — that kind of poverty is not poverty at all. Many women in the 70s embraced the idea of the Ph.D. as a way out of the lack of financial independence, indentured servitude, and general powerlessness of marriage. Claire gives all that up, so far as we know. In contrast, Munro herself has said, “I’ve done housework all my life.” So, to Munro, there is a potential poverty in the academic life that bears no comparison to the potential richness of a good marriage: an alliance that allows for someone the freedom to be, off and on, completely alone.

Five: Ghost Presences in “The Albanian Virgin”

Shelley’s Frankenstein is never mentioned in this story, but its presence is implied. Frankenstein is a mythic tale of misbegotten ambition. Ironically, in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley has Robert Walton say:

[N]othing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose — a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

Being married to the wrong man and being devoted to the wrong purpose (such getting a Ph.D. in the novels of Mary Shelley that no one reads and in which you yourself have no interest) are situations that are not tranquil. To get away will take a transformation similar to being captured by a mountain tribe. To get away will take an embrace of danger and recklessness. But get away you must.

Another implied presence in the story is Freud.

Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own.

~From Sigmund Freud’s 1925 paper “The Psychical Consequences of the Anatomic Distinction Between the Sexes”

Passivity is one of the key markers in Munro; passivity is a form of insanity. Thus she dismisses Freud. Freud famously remarked that he could not answer the question: What do women want?

Munro’s narrator supplies some answers for Freud: some women want a man who combines fatherly goodness and adolescent sexual power in one lover. Some women want to be free of having to submit to anyone’s assigned purpose for them. Some women want to do men’s work, some women want to do women’s work, and all women want to have a purpose. Charlotte may be a pretender, but at least she has a vision of purpose — she wants her Albanian tale to be made into a movie.

Curiously, when Claire the bookseller is talking about how she loves to set up the books so the subjects slide into one another, she gives these shelves as an example:

Political Science could shade into Philosophy and Philosophy into Religion without a harsh break, so that compatible poets could nestle together, the arrangement of the shelves of books – I believed – reflecting a more or less natural ambling of the mind, in which treasures new and forgotten might be continually surfacing.

Note how Psychology doesn’t appear on these shelves, nor are Psychologists counted among the Poets. 

Six: Running Away

There are numerous runaways in this story: Claire, Lottar, Mary Shelley and her sisters, and Charlotte herself, who in the end runs away from the hospital with Gjurdhi. Claire and Nelson talk, later in their marriage, about “starting a new life, somewhere far away, where we don’t know anybody.”

Running away is a perverse theme with Munro — perverse because “running away” is most often associated with moral failing. But with Munro, running away is a necessity required for self-preservation. Three great Munro stories (and others) reflect this: “Runaway,” “To Reach Japan,” and “Train.”

In “The Albanian Virgin,” running away is associated with necessary transformation. After Claire arrives in Vancouver, she admits that she is in a bad way, “underfed and shivering”:

But I was not despondent. I had made a desperate change in my life, and in spite of the regrets I suffered every day, I was proud of that. I felt as if I had finally come out into the world in a new, true skin.

Seven: Story-telling

“The Albanian Virgin,” itself a daring high-wire act of extremely complex story-telling, is also a funny riff on the act of story-telling.

For one, there are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. One of the thrills of “The Albanian Virgin” is that Charlotte may or may not be the real Lottar, but a companion thrill is that Lottar is for sure an alter ego of great significance for Charlotte. Similarly, the attentive reader also knows that many of Munro’s heroines are stand-ins for herself as she explores the meanings, what-ifs, and consequences of choices in her own life. Assuming the guise of someone slightly different (Claire) or very different (Charlotte), in the form of fiction, thus provides not just a therapeutic role, but a philosophic one as well: the attempt to see things from another point of view. 

Secondarily, Perkin Warbeck, one of the Mary Shelley novels that Claire is studying, is about a pretender. Munro appears to be interested in what we pretend to be, as opposed to what we really are, when we finally run away and start anew.

Given that identity in Munro wears many hats, so it is with the process of writing. “Fiction,” of necessity, may be from your own life or things you’ve read or heard, although to others your writing may feel like theft, petty or otherwise, and get you banned from certain circles, including your own family. Writing is always a conversation with other writers, be they novelists, philosophers, historians, or philosophers.

Charlotte is the quintessential story-teller, spinning a tale to keep Claire returning to her hospital bed-side like a modern day Scheherazade. But Charlotte is also a bit of a peddler, a bit of a grifter. She and her husband have gotten known as shop-lifters, to the extent that they are banned from certain stores. Charlotte even goes so far as to review other writers, as when she refers to Anais Ninn as “that old fraud!” One can’t help but think, in turn, of Charlotte herself as “that old fraud.” But what an entertaining fraud.

Is writing necessarily a suspect enterprise, stealing as it does from here and there, and even venturing into banned territory?

Munro clearly does research for some her stories: “Axis,” “Lichen,” and “Dulse” are but a few where complex scientific ideas are used as metaphor. Munro archly reveals her research for “The Albanian Virgin”: A Trek through the Black Peaks, High Albania, and Secret Lands of Southern Europe.

And yet, even if the writer is a bit of a shop-lifter, a bit of a peddler, a bit of a fraud, and subject to being “banned in Boston [or Wingham],” you have to admit the story is still wildly entertaining.

Eight: The ideal reader

Charlotte does a riff on reading. She starts out by remarking that she can’t believe that Anais Nin (that “old fraud”) is still on the go. She tells the young bookseller to pay no attention to her presumption, that she’s quite fond of Nin, that it’s Henry Miller she can’t stand:

She went on talking about Henry Miller in a scoffing, energetic, half-affectionate way. She seemed to have been neighbors, at least, with the people she was talking about. Finally, naively, I asked her if this was the case.

“No, no. I just feel I know them all. Not personally. Well — personally, Yes, personally. What other way is there to know them? I mean, I haven’t met them, face to face. But in their books? Surely that’s what they intend? I know them. I know them to the point where they bore me. Just like anybody you know. Don’t you find that?”

Hmmm. How dare Charlotte, that old fraud, perfectly express how I feel about reading and writers? That I love Ernest Hemingway, but now that I know him I’m bored by him? That I feel I know Henry James, know his hesitancies, know his sureties, but am never bored by him? (The key thing being that he changes over time: his concerns deepen or change, and the writing changes, too, the way a real person changes.)

And then, of course, there’s how I feel about Alice. I feel like I am in the presence of a person when I open one of her books. A complex, shimmering person. So Alice is being coy here. Reader, do you think me a fraud? are you bored with me?

And the ideal reader? Someone who doesn’t just skim the surface. Someone who takes the time. Someone who allows the time it takes for things to gel or rise to the surface; someone who allows the story to take life, someone who wants to join in and converse with as much of the story as possible. Someone who assumes that writers are people allowing themselves to be known.

But the ideal reader must be willing to explore, take risks, and endure, like Lottar, injury, as well as the expense of time and danger in strange encounter.

Nine: I have so many reactions to this story. What do I make of all this?

In “Differently,” Georgia’s writing instructor says her stories have:

Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time. Also, too many people. Think, he told her. What do you want us to pay attention to? Think.

But he misses the point. Georgia is actually writing about thinking — how thinking is never about just one thing. Georgia, like Munro, was after the kaleidoscopic shimmer of inter-related forces as the true manner in which we perceive reality. To represent the multiplicity of how we experience any one event, Munro’s necessity is the juxtaposition of the “too many things.” She must juxtapose scenes from radically different times and places. She wants us not only to pay attention to all of the too many things, she wants us to see how these many things interact. She wants the reader to construct the answer, much in the manner of the new novel espoused by Alain Robbe-Grillet. 

It’s the reader who is supposed to do half of the thinking. “The Albanian Virgin” would have driven this writing instructor crazy. As for me, I loved it: the exotic, dangerous foolhardy adventure, the foolishness, the chaos of striking out on your own, the exploration of gender role, the exploration of the idea that sometimes it’s men who have all the fun, the instability, the feeling you don’t understand what is going on, the exploration of what it means to be really trapped and “wracked up”, the idea that a marriage may actually need to be blown up, but it won’t be easy or look good, the interest in what it means to be a story teller, and the idea that a steady purpose is more likely to prevent one from being “wracked-up all the time” than is finding the perfect partner, although finding an (imperfect) partner can help.

Ten: Understatement

Munro’s understatement gives Munro’s writing untold power. A lot is left unexplained. Gaps in the narrative, leaps in time, and ellipses in logic all abound. Diction is typified by mental skips, the shorthand of slang, and extreme reserve.

Claire tells us that her husband is kind and that her affair with Nelson was marked by “clarity of desire.” She does later think that she would have liked to have been able to describe it as a “capturing tide” and a “glorious and harrowing event,” but apparently neither her husband nor Nelson’s wife were interested. Thus Munro dismisses the grandiose.

The truth of the matter, from Nelson’s wife’s point of view, was her refusal of Nelson’s offer to walk her to her late shift at the hospital: “she told him she would rather be escorted by a skunk.”

Claire’s husband explains in three words why the marriage is a disaster: first, he wants a wife who is “unwracked-up.” Second, he wants someone who is “kind.” Third, he wants someone who is “sensible.”

That’s it. That’s the backstory of Claire’s marriage and why she had to get out. Done and done. Undertold. Understated.

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“A Real Life”
by Alice Munro
from Open Secrets

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Trevor

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]M[/fusion_dropcap]unro’s stories constantly interrogate assumptions about what goes on in a life. She examines the lies we tell ourselves to cope. She examines the deeply buried pain that goes on in the kitchen while someone silently cleans up. She’s constantly questioning what life is made of, what makes a real life? So it was with great interest that I started “A Real Life,” curious just how Munro would explore these themes again. Wonderfully, she does it by showing us a life viewed from so many angles we simply cannot know what is real and what is false. Somehow this works perfectly to show us just how complicated a real life is.

Munro begins the story with an assertion of the truthfulness of some matter, but it is far from reassuring:

A man came along and fell in love with Dorrie Beck. At least, he wanted to marry her. It was true.

I have no reason to disbelieve the first two sentences. Even after reading the third sentence, I still think the first two sentences are true. But that third sentence — “It was true” — that makes me question the voice that needs to find such reassurance. It sounds like however “true” that love and desire to marry was, something has shadowed that truth. It’s a subversive way to begin a story!

Though the story begins with Dorrie Beck, our central character is an older woman named Millicent. I suspect the person reassuring the truthfulness in that opening paragraph is Millicent herself. Millicent has ideas about how life should be, and if life isn’t quite lining up that way, she finds a way to realign it all. In particular, Millicent is not comfortable with sex, so she finds ways to eliminate it from everyone’s story. Here is the second paragraph where we get to know a bit about Millicent:

“If her brother was alive, she would never have needed to get married,” Millicent said. What did she mean? Not something shameful. And she didn’t mean money either. She meant that love had existed, kindness had created comfort, and in the poor, somewhat feckless life Dorrie and Albert lived together, loneliness had not been a threat. Millicent, who was shrewd and practical in some ways, was stubbornly sentimental in others. She believed always in the sweetness of affection that had eliminated sex.

Millicent herself has a husband and three children, but for years her husband has been “decent — mostly, after that, he left her alone.”

For all of this, it is Millicent herself who encourages Dorrie to move to Australia and marry the man who fell in love with her, or, at least, wanted to marry her, when Dorrie has cold feet. At first, she tries to figure out why Dorrie is hesitant.

Millicent had to take a chance, though it embarrassed her.

“If you are thinking about what I think you may be thinking about, then it could be that you are worried over nothing. A lot of time when they get older, they don’t even want to bother.”

“Oh, it isn’t that! I know all about that.”

Oh, do you, thought Millicent, and if so, how? Dorrie might imagine she knew, from animals. Millicent had sometimes though that if she really knew, no woman would get married.

Nevertheless she said, “Marriage takes you out of yourself and gives you a real life.”

And marriage seems to work out well for Dorrie. She writes a letter to Millicent telling her about all of the great things that are going on in her life. They are true. We wonder. But we also wonder just what complicated and convoluted life Millicent is living. She’s lonely as the story is being told years later. What has her life become? Mostly, not, to her, a “real life.”

For Munro, though, the “real life” is not the one that is intended, and it’s not the one that is idealized, and it is not even the one that is feared. It’s some intangible and impossible to imagine combination of all of that. The life we are living is very influenced by the life we want to live and the one we imagine we are living.

This story has a lot more going on in it than I’m approaching here. There’s another character I haven’t even mentioned: Muriel White. She’s another friend to Millicent, though, we learn, not Millicent’s first choice for “best friend.” Muriel herself is single and then ends up married as the story goes on, so each of her friends transition from some kind of half life to the real life that Millicent imagines, to varying degrees of success. The story explores these relationships wonderfully, though, for me, they are all tinged by expectations, fears, and unvoiced failings. It’s a great look at real life.

Betsy

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]M[/fusion_dropcap]unro places “sentimentality” front and center in “A Real Life.” On page one, Munro remarks about the main character (who is the wife of a prosperous farmer in the 1930’s):

Millicent, who was shrewd and practical in some ways, was stubbornly sentimental in others. She believed always in the sweetness of affection that eliminated sex.

These two sentences are quintessential Munro. There is a leap or a gap between the first and second sentence, as if something has been left out, and there is a discontinuity within the second sentence, as if the writer, or Millicent herself, had tripped over her own words. Millicent’s sentimental beliefs are at odds with reality. Even if Millicent is able to obliterate any awareness of sex or her participation in it, sex (and all of its loud insistence) still exists in everyone else.

Why is sentimentality such an issue in twentieth century writing? It had been very popular in the nineteenth century. There was a revulsion against it in the literature of the twentieth century, perhaps due to the horrors of two world wars, world-wide depression, and holocaust. Excess expression of emotion by ordinary people could seem, against that back-drop, lacking in proportion and self-knowledge.

In 1979, John Irving published “In Defense of Sentimentality” in the New York Times (see here).

Irving defines sentimentality as “wishful thinking.” He discusses the conundrum of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which is both wishful thinking and brilliant at the same time. To me, what tames the sentimentality is the magical realism of the ghosts of Christmas. For Irving, the taming factor is Dickens’ comic voice. For both of us, the sentiment is in praise of selflessness and the success of the sentiment is that the structure makes it clear that selflessness is, while needed, rare and only wakened with the rarest of stimuli.

Millicent’s sentimental belief that she can eliminate sex from her marriage and her life through hard work and steadfast sweetness is realistically impossible. Sex will out. And yet, paradoxically, “A Real Life” places shrewdness, practicality, sentimentality, and sweetness within a narrative that is undercut with ambiguity. Balancing stubborn sweetness against ambiguous truth, the story forces us to realize, Dickens-like, how desperately we are all in need of Millicent’s determined hard work, love and sweetness.

Irving concludes his 1979 essay, (somewhat in support of Munro) by remarking:

[W]hen we writers — in our own work — escape the slur of sentimentality, we should ask ourselves if what we are doing matters.

So what is Alice Munro up to in “A Real Life”? She has posed sentimentality as the central hurdle she must overcome, and she has simultaneously undercut Millicent’s wishful thinking about the power of “the sweetness of affection” with the revelation that Millicent thinks she can keep sex at arms’ length through the power of her sweetness. This would be a tragic stance if it were not also comic.

The reader is thinking that it is a rather open secret that in general men and women like, and indeed require, sex. So how does Millicent’s husband deal with Millicent’s sweet frigidity? Later in the story we learn that Millicent has exacted a promise of sobriety from Porter, but it is accepted that while he doesn’t drink in the house, he keeps a bottle in the barn. We wonder if sex is the same, that it is forbidden in the house, but who knows what goes on in the barn?

But Munro has taken a Dickensian turn, here. Not only does she appear to be fond of her characters and touched by Millicent’s sweetness, she also intends, like Dickens, to distract and entertain us with detail and comedy. The story opens this way:

A man came along and fell in love with Dorrie Beck. At least, he wanted to marry her. It was true.

We know right from the first paragraph that the story is about “love,” or at the very least, marriage. Again, the narrator appears to trip a little: is it love? Is it marriage? Or, as the title suggests, is it real life? Again, there is the trademark Munro ellipse. Something makes Millicent say to herself, “It was true.” The reader deduces, right from the start, that not everything Millicent says or believes is exactly true, but is precisely true in the aggregate. Marriage has to do with love in all its varieties and absences and that is real life.

“A Real Life” is also an argument about whether sentimentalism can be “true.” Somehow, I think it boils down to the issue regarding the power of hard work and sweetness. In many of Munro’s stories, sweetness, while misguided, still has the power of salvation (think of Violet in “A Queer Streak,” or the aunt in “The Ticket,” and the singer/undertaker/comfortor in “Comfort”).  So “A Real Life” is a comic entertainment and a love story, both of which require a happy ending, and it is also a story about real life, and as such carries a dose of the underbelly and uncertainty.

From the opening, the plot immediately turns its attentions away from Millicent and concentrates on Dorrie Beck, Millicent’s neighbor.

She glowed with resolution. She was a big, firm woman with heavy legs, chestnut brown hair, a broad bashful face, and dark freckles like dots of velvet. A man in the area had named a horse after her.

Worthy of Dickens, this is. You have to love a girl who could strike a man so powerfully (despite her lack of delicacy) that he would name a horse after her. This delighted me. And with Dorrie’s entrance, I have forgotten all about the problem with Millicent’s wishful thinking and Porter’s sweet but cold bed.

Dorrie and her brother Albert have an unconventional compact with Millicent and Porter. Dorrie’s family, once well off, has gone belly up. The house and furniture have all been sold at auction. But then, Porter buys back the empty house for Dorrie and Albert to live in. Albert was “not very well” when he came back from WWI, so he had given up any aspiration to the kind of job a college educated man would seek. Physical work was what he needed, and he became the delivery man for the local grocery store. Dorrie and Albert did not pay Porter rent. What they did was pay him in kind. Albert played the role of hired man, and Dorrie helped Millicent with the kids and housework.

It all seems rather amicable and pleasant. But were you to read the story again, you might catch a whiff of the plantation, with Albert being owned, so to speak. And that is not the only whiff of possession. Albert always told his sister that “people living alone are to be pitied,” a wisdom he gleaned from his rounds delivering groceries, a wisdom he appears to use to keep Dorrie in his house. Dorrie herself, when she was telling about her dreams of an expedition to the Arctic Circle, revealed that she could not go because:

I had my brother. I couldn’t leave my brother.

So in addition to this story’s interest in the possession of other people, there’s a associated whiff of incest, which, if not physical, is surely emotional. After probably twenty years, Albert dies, and Dorrie is lost. Munro says she “may have become a little unhinged.” This somehow embodies the idea of an incestuous relationship.

Albert having died, Dorrie is now living alone in the house: the house is a mess, and Dorrie lives and dreams hunting and trapping. She is not your ordinary blind date, and yet fate intervenes in the form of a traveling Australian, and his blind date is exactly what Dorrie becomes.

A visitor in town is the occasion for Millicent (who has always had unfulfilled social aspirations) to give a dinner party. She invites Dorrie. What a visitor! What a party! What salvation in the form of a meal!

Millicent pulls out all the stops. Out on the lawn the table holds four salads (potato, carrot, jellied, and cabbage), three proteins (devilled eggs, cold chicken, and salmon loaf), delicacies (the warm biscuits and relishes) and desserts (the angel food cake and the Bavarian cream). All of this is prepared in a day and without a refrigerator, and the preparation includes the pressed damask table-cloth, the polished silver, and the silver serving spoon. Thus Munro demonstrates Millicent’s formidable power, and her own as well. We have forgotten all about Albert, and we have forgotten all about Porter, as well.

An epistolary romance ensues between Wilkie, the Australian, and Dorrie, the Canadian. A proposal of marriage arrives. Once again all-capable, Millicent organizes Dorrie’s wedding: the dresses, the hats, the food, the service at the church. Once again, the reader is diverted with Millicent’s determined, loving and energetic generosity.

On the big day, Dorrie does not turn up. Millicent goes to see her, and Dorrie says she “can’t leave here,” and Millicent, desperate to have all her work in service of saving Dorrie succeed, is reduced to lying. Dorrie has to leave, says Millicent, they’ve sold the house. Dorrie and Millicent have an argument about that. And in the midst of the rush and the emotion, Millicent wonders if it’s sex that’s bothering Dorrie. Dorrie says:

Oh, it isn’t that! I know all about that.

Millicent wonders how . . . and the second time through, the reader wonders how as well. Was it Albert? Was it Porter? Was it the man who named the horse after her? Or all three? Does salvation come in different forms?

But Millicent can’t dwell on this question — she has work to do. She has to get Dorrie to her wedding. So Millicent cries. And promises to “look after Albert” in the graveyard. Besides — Millicent has really gone to a lot of trouble to carry this wedding off. In truth, Millicent will miss Dorrie. It has not been easy for Millicent to make friends in town, the prosperous town women not being able to accept a prosperous farm wife as an equal. But she knows Dorrie has to have “a real life.” Dorrie does finally arrive at her own wedding, and off she and Wilkie go to Australia.

The story is comically romantic and touchingly sentimental. After all, Millicent, at some cost to herself, saves Dorrie from being alone in a dirty, empty house. What is the cost? Millicent loves Dorrie and loses Dorrie. Millicent, after the wedding, tells Dorrie that Wilkie has the power to change everything, to give her adventures, to make her “a queen.” The reader wonders about that: whether Porter has, in real life, made Millicent a queen. (Maybe yes, maybe no.)

Some years later Dorrie writes to Millicent that she’s been happy. The Queen of Tonga, she says. After Wilkie dies, Dorrie reports that she:

stayed on, in Queensland, where she grew sugarcane and pineapples, cotton, peanuts, tobacco. She rode horses in spite of her size, and she had learned to fly an airplane. She took up travels on her own in that part of the world. She had shot crocodiles. She had died in the fifties, climbing up to look at a volcano.

This is all possible. It is true that all this goes on in Queensland, where Wilkie has made Dorrie a queen. Dorrie has the unusual grit required to do all this. So the reader is left with two endings. One is the sentimental ending we require (because we too love Dorrie), and one is the “real life” ending — that possibly, out of love, Dorrie has made it all up to make Millicent happy.

Somehow, the story is written so that it is possible for the reader to hold the two endings in mind simultaneously, the one where there was no hanky panky in the barn and Wilkie really was rich, and another where the irregularities of Dorrie’s life may have included incest or Porter or more, and where Wilkie wasn’t rich, and did not make Dorrie a queen, but Dorrie made the story up to make Millicent happy.

Munro makes clear that we revise life to make it fit. Millicent eliminates sex. Dorrie assumes activities normally only available to men. Porter drinks in the barn. Millicent’s friend Muriel, after quite a few years of numerous questionable affairs with married men, reforms and marries a minister.

When Muriel and Millicent are making the wedding clothes, they refashion old straw sunhats with satin. Muriel re-designs an old evening blue evening dress for Millicent to wear as maid of honor (how appropriate, given Millicent’s essential virginity). Some of the revisions involve stubborn sentimentality. Millicent is stubbornly oblivious to the fact that Muriel or even Dorrie may have been Porter’s source of sex. As for Munro, although the story purports to be about an Australian falling in love with Dorrie, the reader realizes, as in other Munro stories,  that the real life and the true love are between the women, between what Millicent shares with Dorrie.

Irving asks, if a writer isn’t striving to address what we wish for, does the writing matter? Here, Munro proposes one love story and substitutes for it another; she proposes one ending and hints at another. And yet throughout, there is the sentimentalism that Irving urges upon the modern writer, the human yearning for the possibility of true love — what we all wish for.

Munro is able to get away with deep sentiment because it is always undercut with the underbelly; sometimes Irving’s longed for “wishful thinking” is laced with a loving, Dickensian comedy.

As for “a real life”? A real life in Munro is understanding that you never have a complete understanding of people’s statements, intentions, actions, or motivations. The whole thing (a real life) is a stab in the dark. Sometimes you don’t see what is going on because of someone else’s reserve, short-sightedness, obfuscation, outright lying, or emotional or mental defect. And sometimes those faults are your own. So making the best of it is the most you can hope for. You give a shape to things, you give a story to life, and you go with that. If you’re Millicent, you can do pretty well because you have a streak of sweetness and the capacity for hard work.

“A Real Life” is shot through with the weft of sentimentality and the warp of the comic-gothic, and taken as a shimmering whole, like Dickens, it succeeds. Mightily. Magisterially.

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