Category: Alice Munro

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“Differently”
by Alice Munro
from Friend of My Youth

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Trevor

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]A[/fusion_dropcap]h, the complexity of life and all of its disorder. Ah, Munro’s beautiful attempts to explore such complexity on its own terms instead of diluting it all down to some kind of epiphany or lesson, or even down to a single conflict, even if that’s what her characters yearn for.

“Differently” is a complicated story. It deals with many conflicts, most of which cannot be reconciled. For example, our central character, Georgia, left her marriage and her marriage home years ago but is visiting the old place. Why? There’s certainly a bit of torture. She feels a tug back to that time, a regret, perhaps, that she left. At the same time, hers was a situation she needed to leave. She would have also regretted staying. And neither choice would have made her life its perfect version: “People make momentous shifts, but not the changes they imagine,” Georgia realizes. And then she thinks:

Just the same, Georges knows that her remorse about the way she changed her life is dishonest. It is real and dishonest.

There’s just some of the complexity.

Interestingly, “Differently” begins with a bit of creative writing advice. Georgia is a writer in a creative writing class. Her instructor’s response:

Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Thing, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think.

Well, in such a complicated world, who can say? And that’s just the “important thing” that I think Munro wants us to pay attention to in this story. “Differently” is a story about how difficult life can be for many, how the better way to go through it for them, if only they could have the foresight of the passage of time and the approach of death, can at best be merely suggested in the word “differently.”

Of course, complications find us but we are also quite adept and find them on our own. That’s at work in this story, to the point Georgia realizes: “Her life filled up with such lies.” She seeks order when she can find it, and the best place is her bookstore:

At times the store was empty, and she felt an abundant calm. It was not even the books that mattered then. She sat on the stool and watched the street — patient, expectant, by herself, in a finely balanced and suspended state.

Alas, such order is elusive.

So I’m sitting here trying to figure out a good way to summarize “Differently,” to provide a basis for my post. But there are quite a few characters, and each leads to different threads that would be interesting to follow. The beating heart that pumps the blood through the story is a conflict between Georgia, the woman we have been following from the beginning, and her old friend Maya, who is now dead. Georgia and Maya met through their spouses, Ben and Raymond. They became “friends on two levels. On the first level, they were friends as wives; on the second as themselves.”

The story begins (after its look at Georgia’s creative writing advice, and a note that she now lives with that reductive creative writing instructor — another of life’s what is going on moments for Georgia) with Georgia’s visit to Raymond, who was married to Maya up to her death. Raymond himself is now remarried. So is Ben.

There’s quite a bit going on at this point in the story. This is Georgia’s trek into her own past, the pain of which is, apparently, sufficiently distant to allow her to look back almost longingly, indeed, as I mentioned above, with the pain of regret that things didn’t turn out differently. The pain is real as she visits her old house:

She ought to have stayed away from this neighborhood. Everywhere she walked here, under the chestnut trees with their flat gold leaves, and the red-limbed arbutus, and the tall Garry oaks, which suggested fairy stories, European forests, woodcutters, witches — everywhere her footsteps reproached her, saying what-for, what-for, what-for. This reproach was just what she had expected — it was what she courted — and there was something cheap about doing such a thing. Something cheap and useless. She knew it. But what-for, what-for, what-for, wrong-and-waste, wrong-and-waste went her silly, censorious feet.

Even these feelings are complicated. Is she thinking of her time with Ben? Yes, she is. About her fairy tales with her children when they were young? Yes, of course. But she is also thinking about her friendship with Maya, which ended (justly, unjustly) due to other complications (betrayals) years before Maya’s death.

They’ve each gone their own way. Now, though, Maya’s time is over. Georgia cannot walk back in and affect Maya’s life anymore. This brings to her a realization of her own mortality, to her own thought that if people had any idea of their own death they’d live their life differently.

However, she has no clue what differently means. She’s realized that living differently really brings up a new reality that is filled with its own problems and desires to have things differently.

It’s beautiful.

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Betsy

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]I[/fusion_dropcap]n “Differently,” Georgia remembers back when she was married to Ben, a naval officer, and Maya was married to Raymond, a surgeon. The men had been schoolboy friends, and Georgia became great friends with Maya, who was quite rich and, due to being rich, able to be independent and exotic. Maya had sworn off deeply serious extra-marital affairs, although she was currently keeping her hand in with Harvey. Georgia had begun working in a tiny bookstore, and she enjoyed the life outside her marriage. Georgia liked the conversations about books, and then she suddenly embarked on a wild affair with a motorcycle riding patron named Miles.

Arriving home from a tryst on the beach with wild hair and swollen lips, she says things to the grandmother who is babysitting like:

My car wouldn’t start . . . I walked all the way home. It was lovely.

The narrator’s opinion of this situation is summed up in:

Her life filled up with such lies.

Unexpectedly, Maya swipes Miles from Georgia. The reader is not sure why. Out of a desire to prove she can? Out of carelessness? Perhaps out of a desire to save Georgia? Or just for the fun of it? Or all of these impulses at the same time?

Georgia cuts Maya dead and never sees her again.

Which is strange, because Maya does in fact die. The reader intuits that female friendship and allegiance are very important to Munro, and that Maya in fact dies of the betrayals, both Georgia’s and her own. Georgia always thinks she might make up with Maya. And then Maya is dead.

The story’s frame is Georgia’s visit to Raymond after Maya’s death, and after Raymond has remarried. They reminisce about this impossible woman whom they both loved. In parting, probably remembering her desire to reconcile with Maya, Georgia says: “we never behave as if we believed we are going to die.”

Raymond asks how we should behave. Georgia replies: “Differently.”

The outermost nesting box in the story is that Georgia has taken some bad advice from a writing teacher and has apparently stopped writing. Worse, she has taken up not only living with him but is also doing some of his work in his small publishing outfit and his raspberry farm. Georgia: dead as well.

Behaving differently for Georgia would have been to not listen to the writing teacher, which is what Munro clearly did.

Munro selected “Differently” for her Selected Short Stories. I would have liked to know what her reasons were, but, not knowing, I will guess at what they were. The story makes several complicated connections to Munro’s own life, and maybe she thinks these are the most honest things she has to say about these subjects.

A variety of discussion on a list of topics:

Bookstores: Georgia writes a poignant and honest paean to the bookstore where she once worked. This is the sentence which ends the story:

She thinks about sitting in the store in the evenings. The light in the street, the complicated reflections in the windows, the accidental clarity.

This was when Georgia was a mother with kids young enough that they might still do a card game at bed time. She was married to Ben, a Navy man.

Sitting on her stool at the front of the store, showing her bare brown shoulders and sturdy brown legs, she looked like a college girl — clever but full of energy and bold opinions.

In this environment, Georgia is outside the environment of marriage, one where her husband liked to think he picked their friends. There is the glancing implication that within a marriage there is a kind of lassitude and submission that prohibits opinion and boldness.

The people who came into the store liked the look of a girl — a woman — like Georgia. They liked to talk to her. Most of them came in alone. They were not exactly lonely people, but they were lonely for somebody to talk to about books.

I am moved by that because here I sit, talking to [imaginary] people [in the ether] about books!

It was a community of book-friends.

Georgia plugged in the kettle behind the desk and made mugs of raspberry tea. Some favored customers brought in their own mugs.

Not really Starbucks, not really Barnes and Noble.

Georgia took the store seriously. She had a serious, secret liking for it that she could not explain. [. . .] At times the store was empty, and she felt an abundant calm. [. . .] the store was a straight avenue of bounty, of plausible promises. Certain books that Georgia had never read, and probably would never read, were important to her, because of the stateliness or mystery of their titles. In Praise of Folly. The Roots of Coincidence. The Flowering of New England. Ideas and Integrity.

But there it is: Munro’s wide world — folly, coincidence, ideas, integrity, the women writers of New England.

In the presence of this store, Georgia achieves an almost religious state of mind; she feels an abundant calm.

She sat on the stool and watched the street — patient, expectant, by herself, and in a finely balanced and suspended state.

Like an actor waiting for the curtain to go up. It is no surprise that Georgia meets the lover while on duty in this store, the lover on whose presence the accidental outcomes of the story actually depends.

I don’t mean that we should take this as a word for word celebration of Munro’s own experience in her husband’s bookstore, but I mean, if she were going to pick this story for Selected Stories, it would be in part because she thought she had captured the bookstore thing. Alice liked working at night at her husband’s bookstore. Sometimes she was able to use the time to write.

Friend of My Youth: Maya is a “slippery, shimmery — liar, seducer, finagler,” and Georgia falls prey to her, rejects her entirely, never sees her again. In contrast, in the next story, “Wigtime,” two women reunite and it’s as if they’d seen each other only yesterday, despite all that’s happened. The “Wigtime” women are still in complete sync. The “Differently” women had had a crack-up.

Lovers: This is problematic for the ordinary reader. The lover makes Georgia feel like “a strengthened and lightened woman, not the least in love, favored by the universe.” Munro is rarely clear about the details of sex. What we deduce is that the sex is powerful, that the sex is a life force, and that Georgia has never felt it before, and considers it essential. One must understand that the patriarchal, unequal, condescending power of men in a 50s marriage makes actual unbounded sex almost impossible. In addition, that women think they must submit and surrender to men (maybe somewhat in the way Georgia submits to the writing teacher) makes equality in life or sex impossible. She feels a calm in the bookstore that is not present in her marriage.

Georgia, feeling so liberated, tells the lover she loves him, and he replies in kind. But this wrecks the affair. He turns brutal. He is physically threatening. He betrays Georgia with her best friend. So the lover is no salvation.

But still, Georgia has glimpsed some kind of power, some kind of life, some kind of equality, and she cannot go back. In addition, she cannot tolerate the dishonesty and “sham” of her marriage, given the affair.

Friends who influence, seduce, and overwhelm: Victor’s charisma overwhelms Murray; Maya’s exoticism overwhelms Georgia.

Lovers in 1977 and Lovers in 2017: To a degree “Differently” is a time capsule. Friends like Maya and Victor still seduce people and betray them, but things are a little different now. Women have so much sexual experience before marriage that a housewife nowadays might be puzzled by this story. They have had their “lovers” and their sexual exploration before they marry. There is not as pervasive an inequality. What women are tempted by now is not a real lover but real money and real work. They are tempted by career. It is the work now that “strengthens,” seduces and betrays.

Marriage: Munro has only to allow herself a few strokes to show that, for some women, marriage is problematic. Georgia herself, at the time she is telling this story, is not married to the man she lives with. Georgia says that “because she had been so readily unfaithful, her marriage was a sham. Because she had gone so far out of it, so quickly, it was a sham. She dreaded, now, a life like Maya’s.” What she means is all the lying. But she could not go back, either.

She dreaded just as much a life like her own before this happened. She could not but destroy. Such cold energy was building in her she had to blow her own house down.

Writing: Georgia’s writing ideas are a lot like Alice Munro’s, except for this: it appears that Georgia stops writing. It’s not just friendship that dies in this story; it’s also writing. It feels like Munro is saying that the choice to be an artist is easily put aside, like friendships you think you might rekindle.

Georgia once took a creative writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also, too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think.

But the sad thing is that Georgia doesn’t go on writing. Instead, she marries the writing teacher, who grows raspberries and runs a small publishing business. It doesn’t sound like Georgia writes any more. What it sounds like is submission. Later, at the end of the story, Georgia says, people don’t change.

Too many things: Georgia is the kind of person who wants a multi-dimensional story that pulls itself in differing direction but somehow hangs in a balance.

1. Georgia cannot forgive Maya, but she is able to accept her children’s “forgiveness.”
2. Georgia hates lying and sham, but she is drawn to Maya’s lying and sham.
3. Maya’s husband indicates the way lovers were just a way of life with Maya. He tells about the gardener she plies, during her illness, with admiration and money, the gardener who flees as soon as the garden is done. But he also says, “I didn’t scoot off and leave her.”
4. We are led to believe Georgia wouldn’t barter an hour of her children’s life away. And yet she leaves them, and they are pretty young.
5. Georgia tells her husband about the lover, but she leaves out the part about how her best friend stole him away.
6. Georgia says we would live “differently” if we believed we were going to die, but she makes it a joke.
7. Those two “pale prodigies,” Maya and Miles, were “slippery, shimmery — liars, seducers, finaglers.” But Georgia does not escape from them; she escapes from her marriage. She admits that’s what they were — but she doesn’t admit the same about herself.

Forgiveness: Another element I think Munro might have liked in this story is that of forgiveness. Maya befriends Georgia, and Georgia enjoys Maya’s wildness and unconventionality. She is an escape from the ordinary society of Navy wives, I suppose. They confide in each other to a great degree: Maya is having an affair; she has had an abortion, and Georgia is privy to all that. But when Georgia begins her own affair, the one which is liberating for her, Maya acts the predator and steals the lover and acts as if it is her right and prerogative to do so. Georgia cannot forgive the betrayal.

She feels a paralysis of grief.

Georgia admits the paradox: that these are words you use for the death of a child. And Georgia would not “have bartered away an hour of her children’s lives to have heard the phone ring”; to hear Maya say, “He’s sorry; he loves you very much.” Instead, she calls Maya herself, hears about the casual fling, and “never spoke to Maya again.”

There is a great scene when Maya comes calling, asking to make up. Georgia lets her in the house and ignores her, cleaning the kitchen with stolid, silent attention. Maya phones several times, and Georgia hangs up on her. Later, in a letter, Maya begs. Even later, Maya sends, from Turkey, “a pretty piece of cloth large enough for a tablecloth. But Georgia doesn’t relent. She never forgives Maya. She doesn’t see her again.

Without Hilda [writing to Georgia about Maya’s death], Georgia would not have known. She would have still been thinking that sometime she might write to Maya, there might come a time when their friendship could be mended.

But that is actually self-entitled thinking. She has forgotten about “the vengeful pleasure” that breaking with Maya gave her. Georgia “punished” Maya and did so in a “controlled manner.” It was “thorough-going.”

The strange thing is that it is the lover she is really punishing: “she had to [. . .] root out all addiction to the gifts of those two pale prodigies.”

Georgia refuses to forgive. She remarks to Maya’s husband that if we believed we were going to die, we would behave “Differently.” But it squeaks out, not as confession, but as joke.

Note: Georgia says, with the effortlessness and unexplained entitlement of charismatic people, “My children have forgiven me.”

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“Goodness and Mercy”
by Alice Munro
from Friend of My Youth

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Trevor

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]P[/fusion_dropcap]erhaps it’s because I’m currently reading Anita Brookner’s first few books, where we get magnificent renderings of a spate of young female protagonists who’ve been backed into the corners of life, often by parents, and have no idea how to break down the walls, but Alice Munro’s “Goodness and Mercy” felt surprisingly weak to me as it went down a similar lane. At least, that’s how I feel as I sit down to write my thoughts. Let’s see if I can talk myself through this and come out with a different position on the other side.

“Goodness and Mercy” is another Munrovian mother-daughter drama, among the many masterpieces Munro has written on the subject, though it is quite different from most of the others (“Peace of Utrecht,” “Meneseteung,” early chapters of The Lives of Girls and Women). Here the mother is sick and dying but is at least lively and doesn’t wield her illness as a weapon. Still, the daughter finds herself having to offer up a great deal of her own life to accompany her mother on her path. The daughter deals with this by living almost entirely in her own mind, inventing escape fantasies, feeding on (and perhaps blowing out of proportion) the kindness of others.

As with “Pictures of the Ice,” the prior story in this collection, “Goodness and Mercy” begins with a premonition of death. An old woman, nicknamed Bugs, is travelling by ship from Canada to Scotland. Since she is terminally ill, and she recognizes she’s fading, Bugs is not sure she’s going to make it.

Accompanying Bugs is her 23-year-old daughter, Averill. Again similar to “Pictures of the Ice,” the central character of the story is not the one we meet in the first pages, is not the one whose death has been foretold. It’s someone else whose life will go on once the story is over. Averill seems a side character, along for Bugs’s last ride. And what nuggets of wisdom can Bugs throw out while she approaches her end?

Well, if Averill seems a side character as the story begins, it’s because Averill is very much a side character in her own life. Bugs is a retired singer, famous in her day, and she’s always had a large personality that quashes Averill. Averill cannot imagine a different life, one where the attention isn’t focused on her mother.

But as the story goes one and Averill’s consciousness overtakes the page, we see a deep well of character. Averill has attempted to forge her own path a time or two in the past, but she has never done particularly well there. And so her biggest escape for the time being is to take whatever kindness people offer and elaborate on it in her mind. Whether the others are intending kindness is beside the point. Indeed, I doubt they are since they are also focused on things in their own lives; Munro makes it a point to let us know what thoughts and objects of devotion or responsibility occupy center stage of most of the characters in this story.

It’s in Averill’s mind only where we see her desire for escape. But escape is not possible, not at this stage. Even with the death of Bugs, Averill is forever locked into who she became while on another’s path.

Consequently, for me, the great strength of this story comes in its final few lines where we learn in brief that Averill married twice after Bugs died. The first marriage ends while Averill thinks “that she had chosen her husband chiefly because Bugs would have thought the choice preposterous.” Now, whether that was true or not at the time, it is clear that Bugs influence is still there. They divorce. The second marriage seems to be to a man much like Bugs, one who “either charmed people or aroused their considerable dislike.” He’s the center, presumably, and that life goes on.

While all of this is important and skillfully done, I’m just not sure Munro does much her that impressively. The themes are the strength, and she’s done it better before (and, again, I’m now seeing how Brookner did similar things in her wonderful way). I’m glad for the story as it’s only disappointing in comparison to these others, which are so wonderful most things will pale in comparison. But I cannot help it. “Goodness and Mercy” is good, but it is not great.

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Betsy

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]“G[/fusion_dropcap]oodness and Mercy” follows Bugs, a retired singer, across the sea on a Norwegian freighter. Her daughter Averill is with her, because Bugs is in the last stages of cancer and needs a lot of attention. Bugs wishes to hide her condition from the other passengers, and it takes some doing for Averill to follow all of her mother’s orders.

Here we have familiar Munro territory: the domineering, incapacitated mother and the daughter caught in the middle. But in this case, Averill has chosen to stay with her mother (when Munro herself chose to flee.) Averill has devoted her life to Bugs, who is a sharp-tongued cynic. Averill’s lot is not an easy one, but she bears it well and makes it look almost easy. But it is clear that with Bugs taking up so much space, Averill has hardly room for a friend, let alone a lover. (Although Averill has, in fact, managed a lover or two in the past, “there was something about her participation in sex that was polite and appalled.”

The reader thinks that Averill is used and abused, and the reader wishes for some kind of escape. She deserves the “goodness and mercy” of the title, and such goodness and mercy does in fact appear, in the unlikely form of the Scottish captain. What is surprising is that the consummation is not physical, not a seduction, not the ever-present (in Munro) thrill of a man’s power and a woman’s surrender.

On the last night at sea, the captain and Averill both attend a party given by an admiring, panting passenger, and he finds himself telling a story about a burial at sea, a story in which he reveals he understands the deep complexity of Averill’s situation. There is in his story recognition that when a long period of caretaking finally ends, it is a profound relief. “It was her story.” She knew.

Just as she “finds her voice” and sings the hymn the captain was searching for, Averill also completes the story, in several variations, some of which ended in sex, and some of which ended merely in a deep consummation of understanding.

Averill believed that it was her story that he had told. . . . . Believing that such a thing could happen made her feel weightless and distinct and glowing, like a fish, lit up in the water.

And thus, the power of story-telling. The performance of which can be a sacrament, a religious ceremony.

Munro appears in these later stories to be compiling the ways in which people minister to each other outside the church, and the way their actions add up to private sacraments.

Mercy is compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within your power to punish or harm. I would say Bugs has harmed Averill, but Averill has not retaliated. I would say that the captain has the power to harm Averill further, through mockery or deliberate misunderstanding or through the use of his position and power. Instead, he offers her an artful story, intended to offer comfort.

Notice, of course, that the title is an echo of the close of the 23^rd Psalm: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Munro may have rejected church, but she is not without her theology. It is Averill who saves Bugs with mercy, and it is the Captain who saves Averill with his story. She feels “like a fish, lit up in water.”

Notice also the sacrament of funeral that the Captain performs both in his story and with Averill. Munro, in these later stories, addresses the way people seek out their own means of honoring the dead.

And, by the way, notice the sacrament that is performed by the Captain and by Averill: a ritual of their own making. The captain offers a story and Averill accepts it, sings the hymn.

Storytelling can be a kind of sacrament, a kind of grace in the moment, in the flesh, complex, mysterious, and alive.

Goodness and mercy do not describe Bugs, the selfish old diva, although they may describe her singing and its effect on people. But mercy is Averill in her everyday life, and goodness is the Captain. “Goodness and Mercy” is a strange and wonderful story. Thanks be.

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“Pictures of the Ice”
by Alice Munro
from Friend of My Youth

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Trevor

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]I[/fusion_dropcap]f this story were not included in a collection written by Alice Munro, I would not have suspected — until perhaps the very last paragraph — that it was a story by Alice Munro. It is not bad, just quite different in structure and tone and in how it holds on to a mystery that it, in the end, delights in sharing. It is a complicated story that sorts through a variety of layers and connections, but the way it goes about its business strikes me as much more conventional than a typical Alice Munro story. It seems more gleeful and winking in its tricks. But let’s take “Pictures of the Ice” as its own thing and see what it’s going about.

When the story begins, we hear — from an omniscient narrator — about a man’s imminent death:

Three weeks before he died — drowned in a boating accident in a lake whose name nobody had heard him mention — Austin Cobbett stood deep in the clasp of a three-way mirror in Crawford’s Men’s Wear, in Logan, looking at himself in a burgundy sports shirt and a pair of cream, brown, and burgundy plaid pants. Both permanent press.

Austin Cobbett is about seventy. His wife died a year ago, and he has since left — been partially pushed out, it should be said — of his job as the minister at the United Church. However, rather than sit back and let his life taper down, he’s starting a new life. Indeed, when a member of the community comes in to Crawford’s, he doesn’t recognize that Austin is the man looking at the mirrors and tells a tasteless joke. Where Austin may have chastised the man in the past, on this day he laughs and says, “That’s rich.” Yes, Austin is not dying but is being reborn. He’s at Crawford’s getting a new skin because in a few weeks he’s off to Hawaii to marry a woman he and his departed wife met while on a retreat a few years prior.

After this opening, Munro lays more pieces on the table, in particular we meet Karin, a young divorcee who first helped nurse Austin’s wife and has since helped Austin with whatever other needs he had. Right now, those needs are packing up the old house, selling the stuff, and getting the money to Lazarus House, a charity Austin set up years before. Most of this story is told while closely following Karin.

Karin’s ex-husband Brent has been the cause of much of Karin’s cynicism and bitterness. While they were married, he was a drunk; indeed, he was drunk when their baby boy died, something neither he nor Karin knew quite how to deal with. For his part, though, Brent quit the drink and went for religion. The man who helped him through this period was Austin, but over time Austin’s kind and quiet manner was upended and, of all things, Brent took over Lazarus House and helped install the next, more fashionable, minister.

Rebirths and new starts, all told while closely following a woman who is still grieving the very real and permanent death of a child and whose own life shows no promise of change. The pieces are on the table early on, and now Munro moves them around in an interesting pattern, making us wonder just what leads to Austin’s death and just what is going to happen to the now central character, Karin.

“Pictures of the Ice” is, more than most of Munro’s stories, a plotted narrative with touching quiet and a dramatic, perhaps surprising — unless you catch the clues early on that Austin’s new skin doesn’t quite fit — conclusion. But, in true Munro fashion, it doesn’t end with closure but rather with a new opening that reveals heretofore unknown depths to Austin’s friendship with Karin, how he may not have been preparing for a new life in at all the way he led everyone to believe — everyone but Karin, who caught on in the end:

She thinks now that he knew. Right at the last he knew that she’d caught on to him, she understood what he was up to. No matter how alone you are, and how tricky and determined, don’t you need one person to know? She could be the one for him. Each of them knew what the other was up to, and didn’t let on, and that was a link beyond the usual. Every time she thinks of it, she feels approved of — a most unexpected thing.

And, thus, Austin manages to help Karin get a new start in life.

---

Betsy

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]“P[/fusion_dropcap]ictures of the Ice” was not published in The New Yorker. The subject matter — the old minister — may have seemed a little provincial for their audience. But it is an important story and an interesting one.

Austin Cobbett is a retired, widowed minister who has been put out to pasture by his church, discarded by his foundation, Lazarus House, and widowed by the death of his wife. Austin has a “careful quiet kind of religion” when people were looking for a “stricter, more ferocious kind of Christianity.” He was the kind of guy whose meaning in life was to help others. “Austin had a reputation for knowing how to deal with people who were in a desperate way.” He had a touch for that kind of thing. Austin was always looking for someone to help, although we get the sense that neither his wife nor his kids were the ones he helped.

Karin and Brent were a young couple who had gotten in a desperate way. Brent was a heavy drinker (and so was Karin). Even before their baby died of meningitis (and neglect), Austin had been called to intervene with Brent. Brent ends up moving into Lazarus House, where Austin tried to bring people back to life. But then, of all things, Brent gets all holier than Austin and “there was no way he could stop himself from going for more.”

And soon enough he burst out of Austin’s hold and took a good part of the church with him. A lot of people had wanted that loosening: more noise and praying and singing and not so much quiet talking; they’d been wanting it for a long while.

(Actually, it sounds like the United States, right now in 2017.)

Anyway, where we come in, Austin is getting ready to fly to Hawaii where he is going to marry someone he and his wife met on retreat. Karin, Brent’s wife, has been working for him for some time, at first nursing his wife, and then staying on to be the housekeeper. Karin had been in a bad way as well as Brent. She’d been consumed by rage at Brent for his part in the baby’s death, and it was obvious when Austin took her in.

Austin himself is a skinny old coot, getting skinnier by the day. It probably is time to retire.

What strikes me is this: Austin says “there’s more than one way to love God.”  He goes on to say that “taking pleasure in the world is surely one of them.”

When the story begins, we hear him telling various people about moving to Hawaii and getting married.  But — he’s not going to Hawaii; he’s going to Shaft Lake, way up north. Maybe that story about a wedding and Hawaii was a kind of dream, a kind of wish-fulfillment. He’s actually taken a job as a minister, we learn late in the story, and he intends to live in a trailer. And when he gets there, he drowns in the lake. The reader doesn’t know anything about what happened: whether it was an accident, or whether he was alone, or whether it was a suicide. He had left behind some pictures of the early ice on the river. He’d told Karin to send them to him — later — after he got settled.

It’s not clear at all what happened. But it is clear that his kids were too busy to drop in on him and didn’t want any of his things, so that Karin didn’t feel so bad about stealing some of them.

She thinks he knew. Right at the last he knew that she’d caught on to him, she understood what he was up to. No matter how alone you are, and how tricky and determined, don’t you need one person to know? She could be the one for him. Each of them knew what the other was up to, and didn’t let on, and that was a link beyond the usual. Every time she thinks of it, she feels approved of — a most unexpected thing.

Austin was his own person. Right at the end, he had his hand out to Brent and Karin. And maybe to the people of Shaft Lake, too. Or maybe not. We don’t know. But we do know this: “there’s more than one way to love God.”

The story is followed by “Goodness and Mercy.” Both Austin and Bugsy were people who served the world first, and then, maybe, their families. It’s a tough life, being a public person, being known, being an artist, or, conversely, being a saint. It’s hard on the kids. Both Bugsy and Austin die, both of them running a kind of charade at the end.

So what’s that about the “pictures of the ice”? Was that something to do together with Karin? Something for her to remember him by? The grandeur of it? The shared memory of the excursion?

Does the ice suggest the natural aging and changing of all things? Is it also a suggestion of the ice between him and his kids? And his wife? Does the ice represent the church itself, before Brent brought it back to life? Was it just nature, doing its thing, bringing some early ice that would have melted by the time the pictures were developed, a natural ending to a natural event? Does the ice represent constant change but essential essence?

Just as water can have different forms and still be of the same essence, so can the ministry, or compassion, or the story of a ministry, or the story of compassion.

It’s important that he leaves the pictures to be developed at the store and picked up by Karin. We don’t know exactly how they came out. This is a representation of life itself: that we don’t really know how it’s going to come out, but we do want, as Karin notes, someone else to “see how it comes out.”

The real question of the story is what has happened to Austin. The story starts with a ruse; Austin is buying clothes for a new life, clothes completely unsuitable for the new life he has actually chosen: a ministry at Shafts Lake. The story may have also ended with a ruse. Austen is reportedly drowned; maybe his body will rise in the spring, thinks Karin. Maybe they will have proof. Maybe he has only changed costumes.

Munro is a writer in continual debate with religion. She inquires of compassion and asks if it can be found in the church. In “Apples and Oranges” Murray rejects the ministry, having found his faith suddenly dead. Early in her writing, in “Age of Faith,” she rejects conventional church as reliable. But portraits of compassion persist throughout. Austin is a pointed example. That the name is derived from Augustine is significant.

Augustine of Hippo said:

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.

That is what Austin, the old fool, looks like.

Just to mess with our heads, Munro and Austin pose us the problem of whether Austin’s body will rise again. It matters not, actually. Austin had the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men and women. That is what counts. All else is mystery.

Austin’s goodness is a kind of a curse. He’s not so much a church functionary as a natural born savior. “There’s more than one way to love God.”

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“Oranges and Apples”
by Alice Munro
from Friend of My Youth

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Trevor

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]T[/fusion_dropcap]he main character of “Oranges and Apples” is a man named Murray. The first third or so of the story gives us a rather quick synopsis of his life leading up to a moment when he and his wife, Barbara, discover she may have cancer. That brings on a moment of reflection, upon the mysteries of chance and choice that have occurred in the couple’s journey to this point late in life, when we still may wonder just how they are together. They wonder as well. They’ve chosen to, though.

When she was a beautiful young woman, Murray’s father hired her to help at their department store. “I hired a looker from out Shawtown,” is how the story begins. Murray, gearing up to run the store, falls for Barbara’s beauty and her attitude, though they do not seem like two people who would go well together. Over the years, Murray takes over the store, loses it, starts another venture, becomes civically minded, etc. And then, later in life, he and Barbara have this cancer scare. While they are driving to the doctor’s they pass a farm that seems to have no particular significance to them.

However, that farm used to belong to Victor and Beatrice Sawicky. For years they’d drive by the farm and one of them would say, “I wonder what happened to Victor.” For years, though, “they haven’t bothered.” This is where Munro pulls us back into the past, to a mystery that the characters themselves really don’t understand.

When Victor moved to town, he and Murray struck an immediate friendship . . . at least, from Murray’s perspective. Victor would come over often, and Murray loved talking to him. Munro is clear that Murray’s may have some degree of homosexual attraction toward Victor, though this is not something, if present, Murray would admit to himself. Does his wife see it? Maybe. We don’t know that either. What we get, instead, is something clouded over, something we can merely see the shape of in the shadows.

One day, when he comes home unexpectedly in the afternoon, Murray’s life is changed. But no, this is not what we might expect:

He came home unexpectedly, and he found — not Victor and Barbara in bed together. Victor was not in the house at all — nobody was in the house. Victor was not in the yard. Adam [their son] was in the yard, splashing in the plastic pool. Not far away from the pool Barbara was lying on the faded quilt, stained with suntan oil, that they used when they went to the beach.

It looks like nothing at all is going on, yet, from Murray’s perspective: “In her thoughts, at least, she wasn’t alone.”

Now, once again, we may think we know where this is going. And Munro points in that direction. Certainly Victor, at least, has a thing for Barbara, and she probably knows this. But she doesn’t seem to care about Victor a jot. Despite that, Murray cannot help but feel an almost mad jealousy, displacing himself in his own life:

Daily life continued, ringed by disaster as by a jubilant line of fire. He felt his house transparent, his life transparent — but still standing — himself a stranger, soft-footed and maliciously observant. What more would be revealed to him?

But, and I think this is key to this story, who is Murray jealous of? Of Victor, for his beauty which Barbara must be attracted to, how could she not? Or of Barbara, because Victor should be Murray’s friend, not Barbara’s lover.

Munro deepens the mystery further when we see what Murray does to Barbara and Victor (not that we know exactly what happened), and that later in life he feels Barbara has disappointed him. It’s a strange choice Murray makes, and then he and Barbara choose to ignore whatever it was and whatever it meant.

---

Betsy

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]“O[/fusion_dropcap]ranges and Apples” refers to a game of choice. Which do you choose oranges or apples? The game, according to Barbara, purposely offers easy choices at first, but the choices then get progressively harder, until the game might make you choose between two really good alternatives, or worse, two really bad ones.

The story offers its characters a series of increasingly difficult choices. Murray is offered, among others, these choices:

• Being a minister or running his father’s department store

• Losing his friend or offering his wife to his friend

• Holding a grudge for thirty years or not

Murray’s wife, Barbara, is offered these choices:

• Considering reading to be a primary experience in life, or not

• Having an ordinary man for a husband or a lying stud for a lover

• Fighting (or not) for a husband who is infatuated with a friend

Murray is the main character here, one whose story stretches from college to almost old age. Choice is an important element in Munro stories, which seem to hold that choosing experience is always better than choosing emptiness.

The first choice that Murray makes is to forgo his ambition to be a minister, a choice which is forced upon him because he has lost his faith. At one point, he is ready to talk about this loss and this choice with his new friend Viktor, but he is cut off, and he chooses not to continue. The reader wonders what he would have said.

Murray, the failed ministerial candidate, ends up running his father’s department store, and indeed, eventually runs it right into the ground. In the end, he redeems himself by opening a tourist lodge on some family land, working steadily, almost like a monk in a monastery, and making a life. That’s a choice he had never considered, but the choice was only possible after everything else that happened.

Murray has a gorgeous wife, a wife who was originally hired by his father to work the men’s section of the department store, while it was still a going thing. There’s a pimping aspect to this transaction. Murray’s father had used Barbara’s unparalleled and awesome beauty to sell the goods to the male customers. Barbara’s beauty is not lost on Murray, and he marries her.

As often happens in Munro, happenstance happens to Murray. A big, strapping, galvanizing, charming “Polish Airman” moves into town with his wife. Murray feels revived by Viktor and pursues a friendship with him, and in fact rescues him when Viktor flees his marriage. The thing is, Viktor is not just beautiful. He also talks about ideas. He is invigorating, and he wants to talk, talk, talk. Barbara is, in contrast, a woman who loves to read and read and read, but who declines to talk. Murray is captivated by his new friend.

Murray put Viktor immediately in the same class of human beings as Barbara, but of the two he found Viktor the far the more splendid and disturbing.

People being who they are, Viktor is taken with the gorgeous Barbara, which only makes sense, since they are the two gorgeous people in the story. But does Barbara fall for Viktor? That is Munro’s mystery. I think not. She questions Viktor’s stories, she questions his marriage, and he senses it and insults her.

This reader thinks that Viktor threatens Barbara’s marriage, or Barbara’s primacy, and she ends up enticing Viktor to train his attentions on her.

It’s farcical. Barbara lies out on the ground, sunbathing, purposely tormenting Viktor, I think. Viktor, up in an apartment on the third floor, bare-chested (or possibly nude), studies her with binoculars. Murray, in secret, studies Viktor studying Barbara. Murray, too, has gotten out his binoculars. While Viktor is appreciating Barbara’s body, Murray is appreciating (in horror) Viktor’s.

Weirdly, and sadly, Murray manipulates a situation so that Barbara has to take Viktor some cold blankets on a cold night. It’s as if Murray is offering Barbara to Viktor. The reader puzzles over this, that although Murray adores Viktor, the only consummation he is allowed is to offer his wife to Viktor. And Murray is angry when the whole thing seems to amount to nothing, when Viktor disappears the next day, and when Barbara refuses to talk about it.

What are the choices here? The reader has to decide who has the choices.

Why did Barbara try to seduce Viktor? Was it because she actually wanted him for herself? Or was it because she wanted to get him away from Murray and get him out of the picture entirely? Or a little of both?

Is it Barbara who decides that she chooses Murray and sends Viktor away? Or is it Viktor who discards Barbara and elects to go away himself?

The intensity of Murray’s feeling for Viktor is revealed after Viktor flees. Murray goes into hyperdrive, into a kind of mania, trying to prove himself a superman like Viktor, but in so doing, he loses the store he had inherited.

In the end, years later, Barbara has a cancer scare. Watching Barbara come toward him with the news, Murray thinks, “Don’t disappoint me, again.”

What in the world does he mean by this? Don’t have cancer? Don’t leave me? Don’t leave me the way it seemed you were going to leave with Viktor?

Maybe it’s that simple, and my homo-erotic interpretation is off base. And, actually, “homo-erotic” is off-base, too. Who hasn’t fallen in love with a perfect specimen of their own sex? Someone who makes you feel like a million bucks? Someone who makes you laugh? Some friendships are made of that.

It’s just that when it seems as if Murray loses Viktor to Barbara, Murray turns the tables and offers Barbara to Viktor. It’s a move similar to his father’s, who had hired Barbara specifically to appeal to the male customer. Offering Barbara to Viktor, in this way of thinking, might be a way to keep Viktor close. But Viktor, whatever his proclivities or motives, senses that this situation is not going to be the main chance but is going to be way too complicated, and he flees.

It is complicated, and Murray goes nuts, makes a lot of bad decisions, and ends up being not the big man, but maybe something better: a man who is good at what he finally does do. One of the things this story is about is what Murray should elect to do with his life. Be a minister? Run a department store? Maybe these choices are so bad that he needs some shaking up, a third choice: running the trout lodge, with Barbara, out in the sticks.

“Do not disappoint me again!” There’s more meaning in that mysterious thought than you might at first think.

To me, Murray’s original disappointment was that he couldn’t keep Viktor, and Barbara had failed, or chosen, not to keep Viktor either.

So why is there that throwaway thing about Murray’s faith and not becoming a minister?

It was as if he’d come into a closed-off room or opened a drawer and found that his faith had dried up, turned to a mound of dust in the corner.

Perhaps Murray’s own life has its “closed-up rooms.” Perhaps the faith that died was something autocratic and rigid, something that placed people in boxes. Murray was, after all, someone who had taken sociology courses, and someone who wondered if people might need “counselling.” Maybe when Viktor appeared, one of those closed off rooms got opened up.

Faith: while Munro is fairly opposed to the authoritarian and impersonal nature of institutions, she is none-the-less interested in religious questions: compassion, guilt, forgiveness, humility, waste, prayer, ceremony. In a later story in this very book, we hear about Austen Cobbett, an actual ordained minister who has a “careful, quiet kind of religion.” Austen is a minister who “rarely mentions God.” Austen says: “[T]here’s more than one way to love God.”

Where Murray and Barbara end up is running a sporting lodge, where Barbara can read and where Murray can live somewhat monastically, while still entertaining the men who come to stay. Murray is good at it, and Barbara plays the role she was destined to play in this family — the lure that brings in the business — with her beauty and her ability to toss off a dinner for thirty. And although she gains weight, she still, in this new iteration of her marriage, is free to read and read and read.

Which did Murray and Viktor and Barbara choose? Oranges or apples? The really easy choice between bad and good? Or the more difficult choice between good and good? Or the impossible choice between bad and bad?

All the while I’m put in mind of William Carlos Williams’ “Marriage”:

So different, this man
And this woman:
A stream flowing
In a field.

Note: I assume that anyone reading whatever I have to say about these Munro stories has already read them. This is a conversation about the story, not a teaser to entice you read the story. Best you know that. Because the pleasure in Munro is not so much reading her work but thinking about it afterwards, knowing full well that because the stories are so rich, there will always be someone to disagree.

Second note: Marriage choices, marriage triangles, and long memory about possibilities of long ago loves are much on Munro’s mind in Friend of My Youth. A narrator puzzles over the story she heard from her mother about Flora, who wanted to marry Robert, except that jealous Ellie steals him away, and then acquisitive Audrey steals him away again. It’s the mother’s long memory, however, that sticks with the reader: her fascination with Robert, and her idealization of Flora. In “Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass,” Jack marries Hazel but he thinks he cannot forget Antoinette, except it’s the war he cannot forget. In “Oh, What Avails,” Morris thinks he can have both the girl from his childhood and the woman from the office, but his lying gets in the way. In “Differently,” Georgia cannot forget neither her lover, nor the mesmerizing Maya, nor the way Maya stole Georgia’s lover. In “Hold Me Fast,” Dudley has both the blond Antoinette and the red-haired Judy, but in the end, concedes, you can’t make two women happy. In “Wigtime,” Reuel thinks he can have another teenaged mistress on the side, just the way he had done in his first marriage so many years ago, but his wife outsmarts him. In “Oranges and Apples” Murray wants both Barbara and Viktor. Once again, William Carlos Williams intrudes. Robert, Jack, Dudley, Reuel, Murray, and Williams himself are all different kinds of philandering guys — all “a stream flowing in a field.”

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“Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass”
by Alice Munro
from Friend of My Youth

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Trevor

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]W[/fusion_dropcap]illiam Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798” (sheesh, we should all just call this exactly what we always do: “Tintern Abbey”), the poet famously returns to a place he’d last seen five years earlier. All seems the same — “again I hear/These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs/With a soft inland murmur” — time may as well have not passed. But, of course, it has, and the poet is a different man, a man who has often, while away, reflected back on this scenery while in “lonely rooms” and “‘mid the din/Of towns and cities.” It’s a fascinating phenomenon, revisiting a place one has reflected upon so often, perhaps embellishing in the process.

And what if you are visiting a place for the first time, but a place that has a similar effect, having been such a place for a spouse who would reflect openly about pleasant times somewhere far away, “On that best portion of a good man’s life,” where you were not? Such is the general set up of Munro’s lovely “Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass.”

Hazel Curtis is a widow in her 50s. When the story begins, she has left her home in Walley, Ontario, and finds herself in Scotland, sitting in the Royal Hotel. She has never been here, but she’s often thought of visiting. When he was in the war, her husband, Jack, spent some time in this area, living with his cousin, Margaret Dobie. It was a wonderful time in Jack’s life, to the extent that it plays a part in his growing resentment of pacifists later in life. One particularly aspect of this time that continues to give Jack joy is his relationship with the young daughter of the proprietor of the Royal Hotel, Antoinette.

Jack talked about her in front of Hazel and to Hazel as easily as if he had known her not just in another country but in another world. Your Blond Bundle, Hazel used to call her. She imagined Antoinette wearing some sort of woolly pastel sleeper outfit, and she thought that she would have had silky, babyish hair, a soft, bruised mouth.

For years, since she married Jack, Hazel has heard about this place, this time, this girl, and has been something that has affected her life in “lonely rooms,” albeit not as a source of peace and comfort. And so she has come to see what lies underneath her made-up memories of this place. Much to her surprise, though time has passed, the people are still there, including Antoinette. In her attempt to recover her husband’s past, to become a part of this past, even, Hazel got more than she bargained for.

The problem was just the opposite of what she had expected. It was not that people had moved away and the buildings were gone and had left no trace. Just the opposite. The very first person that she had spoken to that afternoon had been Antoinette.

At the same time, this is Hazel’s own life, and she is about to create her own impression of the place. This leads to a rewriting of everything she thought she knew about this place, but also much of what she thought she knew about Jack.

And not just Jack. Hazel herself has attempted to hide from some things in her own life. There are secrets and attempts to uncover those secrets throughout “Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass,” suggesting just how aspirational that title is. It’s a complex yet warm story.

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Betsy

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]T[/fusion_dropcap]he New Yorker apparently passed on “Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass,” Alice Munro’s fourth story in Friend of My Youth. I am guessing that the entertainment quotient in “Hold Me” was not quite The New Yorker’s dark cup of tea. For one thing, the indomitable Hazel is unsinkable; as is Margaret Dobie, the old lady she meets in Scotland; as is Antoinette, Hazel’s husband’s old girl-friend; and as is the flame haired Judy, the red herring in the whole business.

Another reason The New Yorker may have passed on the story is its element of farce, with all the characters playing a chess game of withholding and lies. Their stubborn silences are maddening, and in the end, the mysteries are mostly unanswerable. A ballad is recited not once, but twice, and as it suggests, nothing in this story is easily held fast. But there is a delicious quality to the whole thing. I loved reading it and loved re-reading it.

Like many Munro stories, “Hold Me Fast” is a lot of stories all strung together, but there’s a looseness to it that frustrates. Nonetheless, I loved it. But I’m Scottish, and I like a determined woman. Also, the recitations remind me of sitting on the front porch in West Virginia, listening to my grandmother, who also did “recitations.”

Hazel is in her fifties, a widow with three grown children. She’s a sensible biology teacher, self-directed and determined, traveling alone and taking notes as she goes. She’s in Scotland on a quest. We gradually realize she wants to see for herself the people her husband Jack talked about, the people he met while on leave so many years ago in Scotland. Jack had been a handsome bomber pilot who flew 50 missions in World War II. Maybe somebody will appear who knew him. Maybe they will tell her about him, she thinks. Maybe they will satisfy some unanswered questions that she has.

The irony is that when she finally meets two people who knew Jack, after all these years, they weren’t hard to find, and it’s clear they did know Jack, but they’re not talking.

From the beginning, it’s not clear to Hazel exactly what she’s doing. The story opens with a note she’s taken in her journal about Selkirk, the Scottish town she’s visiting. She thinks the word “lilac” is not quite right to describe the colors on the hills. But “[s]he didn’t know what to write in its place.” Truth in this story is hard won. Things keep shifting.

Hazel herself is feeling a bit of “panic.” She wonders: “It had to do with a falling off of purpose and the question why am I here?”

She thinks she’s there to pay a visit on a relative of Jack’s, Margaret Dobie, whom he stayed with when he was on leave. She also thinks she’s there, the reader deduces after much difficulty, to find Antoinette, the 16-year-old Scottish “Blond Bundle” that Jack couldn’t stop talking about. But once Hazel finds her, she doesn’t know what to do with her. Antoinette denies she’d ever met Jack, although the reader is quite suspicious of Antoinette’s story that she’d had a husband in England who disappeared.

When Hazel finally finds Miss Dobie, Margaret also denies that she ever knew Jack. The reader begins to realize that handsome Jack had had three women who loved him, none of whom could hold him, none of whom would spill their secrets.

The reader gets all tangled up in the unanswered questions in the story, just as Hazel does, so that it would be easy to miss where we end up. One of the unanswered questions is just why Hazel suddenly had a nervous breakdown after she’d been married for fifteen years. Hazel had stayed in bed for three months, and then, when she decided to get up, everything was different. After three months in bed, she was done with “a part of herself” and she admits that part of what she’s done with is Jack. But just like anybody, she double-thinks that. At the time, “she doesn’t think that any abandonment had to be permanent.”

(I want to note here Munro’s ideals regarding psychology. Hazel’s self-treatment is Munro’s preference. She doesn’t hold a lot of truck for psychological theory, psychologists, or therapy. See “Dulse” in The Moons of Jupiter, in which therapy fails and it is experience, and experience only, that heals the ailing poetess.)

Although Hazel gets out of bed and applies to college, what Hazel doesn’t tell us is why she’s done with Jack. Yes, we know he treats her intelligence as “a kind of a joke,” and yes, we know he talks foolishly to Hazel about the beauteous Antoinette. But we know that Hazel was swept away by Jack, and that their sex-life was good, and that looking at him, she could be, as a young wife, swept away by desire. We know that she is still troubled by her deep attraction to him. What drove Hazel to her bed for three months fifteen years into their marriage? Was it just Antoinette?

Hazel herself doesn’t seem to know or want to admit.

The story diverts itself and us with Dudley, an attractive Scottish man who himself has a secret or two, and who is assigned the role, both by Antoinette and Munro, to entertain Hazel and draw her out. In the course of several days, Dudley has numerous drinks with Hazel, and we discover that Dudley himself is the impossible object of love of two women, and by his nature, we notice that Hazel, in her black velvet pants and ivory silk shirt, is also the object of his interest. So we know Hazel is still attractive, despite the fact that Hazel says she had stopped prettifying herself.

Where this shaggy dog story finally ends up is this: Hazel realizes that the thing that happened to Jack in World War II wasn’t Antoinette (although he may have happened to her), wasn’t his second cousin Margaret (although he may have happened to her as well). We also realize that the thing that happened to Jack was not that Hazel stopped taking care of herself, although Hazel wonders about that.

It’s that World War II happened to Jack, with all its grandeur and all its brotherhood, all its adventures, and all its intensity. And ultimately, what happened to Jack was the immensity of war: its death, confusion, and mystery. By the time of Hazel’s breakdown, Jack had become a shell. Hazel glimpses him once at his store.

All she saw was the stillness about him, a look you could have called ghostly.

I’ve seen that look. Maybe you have, too. What happened was he gradually killed himself off, at the pace of three or four drinks a night.

So what Hazel went to Scotland to find was not why he seemed to pine for Antoinette or Margaret Dobie. What Hazel went to Scotland to find was not what they knew about Jack, or whether they could explain him. What she’d gone to find was this surety: that it was the war that had killed him, not really his desire for Antoinette, not the homeland, and not the fact Hazel’d lost her beauty.

If you survive it, nothing can match the intensity of war. Just read Tim O’Brien. Just read Sebastian Junger. What is life after war?

“Meanwhile, what makes a man happy?” is the penultimate line. Something different, thinks Hazel, than what makes women happy.

I am reminded of the William Carlos Williams poem, “Marriage”:

So different, this man
And this woman:
A stream flowing
In a field.

I think Williams is on Munro’s mind about this time. The last story, “Meneseteung” has a group of boys tormenting an old woman, carting her about in a wheelbarrow and dumping her in a ditch. Almeda dreams of the wheelbarrow. It is so pointed and troubling, this image of a wheelbarrow. There, in “Menesteung,” Munro seemed to be arguing with the possibly misogynistic Williams. But here, Munro seems to be agreeing with him.

As for the Ballad of Tam Lin, the ballad the old Margaret Dobie recites and the one Dudley takes up as well, there is a great essay in the Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro by Heliane Ventura entitled “The Female Bard: Myths, Ballads, Sagas and Songs.” Ventura explores, with some erudition, this later turn in Munro’s work toward ballads and sagas.

As for Munro herself and the overall complexity of her stories? The reader is often perplexed, liked Hazel. Just where am I going with this? Just what is going on here? Is it erudition? Is it showing off? Is it faddy New Yorker dismalities? Or is it a mind working at full throttle, all systems go all at the same time in an immensely complicated, integrated whole, like a huge rumbling rocket poised on the launchpad and you’re the passenger?

I think, the latter.

And I think the best approach is to let the stories gradually sink in. Each story has fully realized people, fully realized places, fully realized forces, fully realized elements, all connected in a vast web, every thread singing, every thread in contact with every other thread. Her stories are not really stories, in any slight sense. They are more compressed novels than mere stories, more very long modern poems than stories, more diamond than coal, more myth than not. There are worlds in her work, and it takes time for Munro’s elaborated and four dimensional meanings to dawn.

But of course, she being so complex, what she means to me may not be what she means to you.

Ultimately, even if you are a woman strong enough to make the choice to lead a self-determined life, strong enough to advise other women to do the same, not everything will become clear to you. Some stories, some people, are a locked room mystery. But the investigations you make may lead you closer to what are not the answers, but to a more accurate sense as to what the real mysteries of life actually are.

And as for that Scottish ballad? In it, a man possessed by fairies begs his lover to hold him fast, no matter the changes the fairies wreak in him, no matter if he transubstantiates from man to snake to lion to esk (which is a name for a Scottish river). In fact, Munro suggests, you cannot really hold a man fast, can’t really understand him, as Williams says. It’s like a field attempting to understand a river.

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“Meneseteung”
by Alice Munro
from Friend of My Youth

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Trevor

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]I[/fusion_dropcap]n “Meneseteung” Alice Munro explores a familiar topic with more depth than before and within the midst of an already compelling and complicated story. I’m referring to the vital exercise of exploring the past, despite the lack of concrete evidence, despite the fact that the explorer simply cannot escape the present, despite the fact that any uncovered truth — though truth it may well be — will almost certainly not be what really happened.

Munro begins this story with an objective tone. She adopts the voice of a researcher and tells us about a book of poems from 1873, written by a woman named Almeda Joynt Roth. Inside the book there is a photograph of Almeda taken in 1865. The book has a short introduction, written by the author herself, telling a few brief facts of her life, which had already had its share of tragedy, her family dead after moving to what as then known as “the wilds of Canada West.”

This book of poetry (which seems to relate to the life of the poetess as described in the introduction) is the primary source for anyone seeking to learn about Almeda. Another important source of information about Almeda’s life comes from a local newsletter called Vidette. There the narrator exploring Almeda’s life can see the local gossip, a little of which surrounded Almeda as she aged and, in particular, as she seems to have shown some interest in a man with a salt mine named Jarvis Poulter. Here is a passage, containing no names, but we’re pretty sure who the subjects are:

Among the couples strolling home from church on a recent, sunny Sabbath morning we noted a certain salty gentleman and literary lady, not perhaps in their first youth but by no means blighted by the frosts of age. May we surmise?

There is not much else about this woman who lived from 1840 until 1903. Jarvis Poulter died the next year. They never married. By the end of her life, the Vidette reports, Almeda had become, “in the eyes of those unmindful of her former pride and daintiness, a familiar eccentric, or even, sadly, a figure of fun.” Her death, as it turns out, was probably caused by some savage youth looking for some fun.

Naturally, as the years passed, nothing at all could be “remembered” about Almeda Joynt Roth. Even her book of poems is a curiosity that shows some genuine but mostly untapped talent. And so, the woman exploring this female figure and telling us this story goes on to fill in the blanks. Despite the objective introductory section and the passages from the Vidette, the bulk of “Meneseteung” is explicitly an invented story.

In it, we meet Almeda, alone and single in this old town, on her pathway to some degree of “eccentricity.” We see her start to lose herself, at least, in the eyes of all who beheld her. Munro’s narrator sees her story through the eyes of a woman in the late 1980s. When Almeda goes to her doctor for some help, this is what the narrator has him say:

Don’t read so much, he said, don’t study; get yourself good and tired out with housework, take exercise. He believes that her troubles would clear up if she got married. He believes this in spite of the fact that most of his nerve medicine is prescribed for married women.

I won’t go deeply into the story that brings things to a head. Suffice it to say that there is a brief write-up of the event in the Vidette, and Munro’s narrator creates a story that is deep and rich in its own right. I want, instead, to go to the story’s end where we get this lovely description of the beautiful and terrifying depths of another’s life (or, even, our own).

The name of the poem is the name of the river. No, in fact it is the river, the Meneseteung, that is the poem — with its deep holes and rapids and blissful pools under the summer trees and its grinding blocks of ice thrown up at the end of winter and its desolating spring floods. Almeda looks deep, deep into the river of her mind and into the tablecloth, and she sees the crocheted roses floating.

The narrator sees herself, for a time, as someone with a unique curiosity, someone who is willing to put the time and imagination into creating a biography where one almost doesn’t exist.

I thought that there wasn’t anybody else alive in the world but me who would know this, who would make the connection. And I would be the last person to do so. But perhaps this isn’t so. People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.

I believe most writers would end there: “rescuing one thing from the rubbish.” It’s a perfect epiphany for her and for the reader. The entire story is, importantly, an attempt to reconstruct a real living creature from the dust of time. Almeda has been dead for over 100 years. No one remembers her. Probably no one has remembered her in over a century. It’s unlikely many have even considered her name. Perhaps they’ve seen the book of poems. Perhaps they’ve even seen her grave stone. But there is a full life there, and there are some tantalizing clues in the record that allow the narrator to imagine doing something noble: an act of rescue.

But Munro does not end the story there. Rather, the epiphany suddenly gets subverted:

And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong. I don’t know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.

With this subversion, the story reopens just in time for the final full stop. We continue to see the depths of this woman. We see the act of investigation, imagination, empathy, and wisdom in the act of reconstruction. We wonder if we’ve gotten anywhere, and so we not only question the past but we also question our present abilities as we ourselves move forward in time.

This is a masterpiece.

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Betsy

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]A[/fusion_dropcap]lice Munro’s “Meneseteung” was originally published in The New Yorker in 1988, and then republished in Munro’s seventh book, Friend of My Youth, in 1990. Munro was in her late fifties when the story was written.

It is a strange, gothic tale set in the nineteenth century: women are taunted and treated with contempt; women go mad; women are nearly murdered or actually murdered, and all within plain sight. Women go dead drunk; or perhaps they’re not drunk at all; women take opiate concoctions for “women’s problems.” In the midst of all this, poetess Almeda Joynt Roth is facing a decision: will she accept industrialist Jarvis Poulter’s proposal of marriage? Her answer to him is shaped by a chance encounter with a woman who has been beaten almost to death in her back alley. Almeda goes to Poulter’s door in her night clothes to ask him for help with what she thinks is the body of a murdered woman. Poulter pokes the body with the toe of his boot and pronounces the woman dead-drunk, not dead, and in no need of a doctor. But he is touched by Almeda’s distress and by her night clothes, and makes a proposal that he walk her to church, which would be a final and open declaration of his intent to marry her. Almeda is repulsed by the situation and by his callousness, goes home, writes a refusal, posts it outside, and locks the door to Jarvis Poulter and to marriage. In the day that follows, she has an extraordinary vision which will shape the rest of her life.

What follows below is a draft that explores some of the elements that appear important in this story. It’s my impression that one could write a book about this story.

Insight as a result of experience

In Munro, change and insight often occur as the result of a fateful, accidental, or even violent encounter or confluence of events. The habits that society instills in us are so strong that only the experience of an upheaval is likely to dislodge them and allow us to think for ourselves.

Experiencing both the near-death of a woman in her backyard and her suitor’s reaction to it allow Almeda the insight that marriage, and marriage to this man, are not for her.

In the topsy-turvy day that follows, Almeda has a pain and drug induced vision of what writing should really be. The uproar in the street behind her house is mirrored by the upheaval in her body as she waits for her period to finally start: she takes some “nerve medicine,” most likely laudanum, a widely used opiate at the time.

She experiences what could only be called a vision. If she had written her ars poetica the day before, and then rewritten it the day after, the two documents would have been very different. Guided by immaturity and a limited experience of life, the earlier one would have emphasized a lyric appreciation of nature that ‘diligently’ overlooked anything that wasn’t pretty.

The second ars poetica would have been very different. It would be like the river. It would aim include everything: the “bliss” of summer, the deeps, the holes, the sweet pools as well as the “grinding blocks of ice” and the destructive, restorative spring floods. It would include the terrible bruise on the beaten woman’s bared backside, and it would include the blood and vomit that matted her hair. And it would include the “silly” hopefulness of her mother’s crocheted roses.

Of course, this ars poetica is similar to Del’s, which appears in the epilogue to Lives of Girls and Women, written so many years before. Del has a “hope of accuracy” that was “crazy, heartbreaking.” What Del wanted was “every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together — radiant, everlasting.”

“Menesteung” is a story that weaves together many elements, but no one element is as important as this particular one: that education and insight are only achieved through painful experience and individual choice. Crucial to Munro is the fact that society’s institutions, especially church and school (but also newspapers and hospitals), are not a source of nurture, but are organizations in the service communities and in the pursuit of control of individuals. It is important that Almeda gathers her insight at home as Jarvis Poulter goes off to church without her. In Munro, insight is most likely obtained outside the walls of church or school or village or any other institution that society has set up to preserve itself.

Experience leads us to situations and choices that can be unconventional to point of appearing to be madness or amorality, but that are, in Munro, the only path to insight.

The meaning of the title

The river that flows through much of Munro’s work is called the Maitland; near its mouth on Lake Huron, a bridge which is called the Menesetung spans the spreading river. In her book, Mothers and Other Clowns, Magdalene Redekop points out that Meneseteung can be pronounced so as to suggest a “tongue that is a menace.” As the story proceeds, it becomes clear that any woman who speaks up (any woman who finds her own voice) is a menace, and needs must be shut up, one way or another.

The name of the river reminds the reader of menses, the word that describes the ebb and flood of women’s menstrual cycles. The river itself ebbs and floods as women do. The fertility of the flood plain is implicitly connected in this story to  women’s fertility. These complex associations are meant to denote nature’s variability and creativity, and the story means us to consider the fertility, generativity, creativity, and inspiration specific to women.

Munro is clearly suggesting throughout the story that women’s creativity is a “menace” to society and that society takes great and specific care to lock it down.

Finally, the title represents an ars poetica — that the poet now wants to write a work that can indicate the whole of what life really is — a very various existence. To concentrate merely on beauty or loss will be a thing of the past. Now she will work on representing life as if it were the river, showing its “deep holes and rapids and blissful pools under the summer trees and its grinding blocks of ice thrown up at the end of winter and its desolating spring floods.”

Instantly, Almeda’s mind makes a typically Munrovian shift, a shift from the grandeur of the river to something immediate:

Almeda looks deep, deep into the river of her mind and into the tablecloth, and she sees the crocheted roses floating. They look bunchy and foolish, her mother’s crocheted roses – they don’t look much like real flowers. But their effort, their floating independence, their pleasure in their silly selves do seem so admirable. A hopeful sign, Meneseteung.

There it is: what might be considered silly is also admirable, like the old aunts in Munro who are filled with acceptance and love and jokes and gentle truth. “Blissful pools and desolating spring floods.” Both. All. Life. Meneseteung.

The role of the narrator

The narrator has no name, no occupation, and she is quite self-deprecating. “I may have got it wrong,” she says. The narrator uses poems from Almeda’s 1873 book, Offerings, and the narrator also quotes from the biographical note which Almeda included in the book. The narrator has made the obligatory pilgrimage to the writer’s town, her street, her house, and her gravesite, and she has also done quite a bit of research in the newspaper of the time, the Vidette.

What at first seems like notes, or a letter, or a casual essay turns into a highly imaginative fictional account of what may have been the most crucial event in the poet’s life. The narrator reads between the lines of the facts she has at hand and produces not only Almeda’s thoughts, but also those of an older very stern, well-to-do suitor. In addition, the narrator imagines not only a brawl between a husband and wife in Almeda’s back alley, but also Almeda’s use of a mind altering drug and her evolving philosophy of writing.

Any academic would reject such an essay out of hand. Herself now the subject of graduate students, it is as if Munro is suggesting that intuition is as powerful a tool as cold hard fact or the reliance on French philosophy.

The narrator has, as she says at the close of the story, been “driven” to “put things together.” But she allows she could be wrong. There are people, says the narrator, “who like to rescue things from the rubbish.” The narrator can be seen as a kind of reader, someone who likes to make connections, figure things out. She is an ideal reader, perhaps.

Explorations, investigations, and the importance of “paying attention”

Munro mentions the idea that Samuel de Champlain had gone up the Meneseteung in his travels. Exploration is therefore a concern of the story, although the kind of exploration Munro and Almeda have in mind very different than the masculine push to sail up unknown rivers and drill down into the earth. At one point in Almeda’s exploration, she says she is exploring “the river of her mind.”

The narrator is clearly embarked on an exploration of her own.

Conducting “investigations” is something the women in Munro’s later stories do: Hazel, for one, in “Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass,” and Gail in “The Jack Randa Hotel.” These “investigations” expose the women to possible ridicule, so the women are, in the end, right or wrong, very brave to make them. Women in Munro also begin “paying attention” in the later stories. There is the sense that “paying attention” becomes the performance of an almost sacred duty.

I believe Munro allows her readers the same distinction.

The narrator says there are “curious” people who like “to put things together.” She allows that “they may get it wrong.” Her self-deprecation, of course, makes her all the more trustworthy. These readers take time and effort to understand what they are reading, and they are doing something important, even if their conclusions may be wrong or even ridiculous. A certain kind of writer and certain kind of reader, Munro allows the narrator to claim, are driven to try to understand life, even at the risk of foolishness.

When Munro mentions Champlain in the story, she associates the grandeur of Champlain with the “curious” housewife reading in her kitchen and the “curious” searcher and the “curious” writer. I believe Munro values people, especially women, who are brave enough to be “curious” and brave enough to attempt to pay attention. These are the real explorers, and the best are the ones brave enough to explore the “river of [their own] mind.”

Munro stakes out some distance from the entire project of Ameda’s Meneseteung. Maybe the narrator is actually ridiculous or even unreliable.  Maybe a lot of graduate students cooking up theses on Munro are also ridiculous or unreliable. But Munro leaves it to the reader to judge for herself. This reader is trusts the narrator’s imaginative exploration and intuition: they represent a possibly truer world view than mere fact could represent.

The Vidette — the newspaper as town “sentry”

The narrator immediately tells us the newspaper treats poetess Almeda with “a mixture of respect and contempt for both her calling and her sex.” The narrator goes on to summarize much of what she has learned from the Vidette, such as the note about “an old woman, a drunk named Queen Aggie” who gets thrown into a wheelbarrow and trundled around by a gang of boys. There is a terrible judgment, disdain, entitlement, and callousness wrapped up in this one short item. A woman being beaten or bullied is an affront to the town’s sense of itself; there is no sense that intervention or assistance is called for. Instead, the paper helplessly complains, “Incidents of this sort, unseemly, troublesome, and disgraceful to our town, have of late become all too common.”

Five items from the paper are quoted, all in written in the same self-assured, entitled and confiding tone. All in all, the paper is an institution which publishes gossip intended to keep the residents of the town in line. So when the paper addresses Almeda Joynt Roth, its contempt is in the service of townspeople who don’t want Almeda getting above herself.

In terms of craft, the use of the Vidette is a riff on the “we” who inhabit Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily.”

What happens when women find their tongue

Physical abuse, tyrannical beatings, taunting, and bullying are directed at two women in the story, so when Almeda dies after having been chased into the cold swamp by a gang of boys, we are not surprised. Murder is both explained away and staring right at you. Some of the abuse in the story is performed by boys and observed by witnesses who report it to the newspaper. Legitimized bullying is excused by the unconventional and strange appearance of these women, including Almeda, who had stopped, by then, being interested in “the adornment of her person.” The paper blithely reports that the boys’ “persecution” of Almeda was entirely possible, but that her subsequent illness was very short. The newspaper accepts it that Almeda has somehow called her own murder on herself.

Gossip and rumor are other means of shutting up troublesome women. The newspaper performs this role for the town.

Drugs and alcohol are another route. Almeda herself has been prescribed laudanum, an opiate concoction freely distributed in the nineteenth century mostly to married women for women troubles. Clearly, this is a drug that can shut you up. There is a sense here that women seek out and willingly accept these soporifics, which can, in the end result in being confined to bed. They collude in being shut up.

In other words, we have the gothic tale of the woman in the attic: locked in, confined, and mad.

The fact that Almeda is a published author of a book of poems does not protect her. She could only really be protected, as Jarvis Poulter notes, if she had a husband. Almeda observes that some married women toy with the idea that they can control their husbands by slavishly serving their likes and dislikes. Poulter’s contemptuous refusal to touch the unconscious woman makes it clear that while marriage might protect her from the town, it will not protect her from Poulter himself.

In the third sentence of the story, we learn that the newspaper, the Vidette (the sentry) refers to Almeda with “respect and contempt,” the contempt a necessary maneuver meant to shut down Almeda’s desire to publish any more books.

So from the git-go, we are aware of the fact that Munro is talking about the contempt people have for women who find their tongue, which hypothetically could be not just women writers but also any and all women. Munro sets the story historically in the explicit past, but through the everlasting facts of women’s menses and the wildness of the river she maintains the story’s truths as in the implicit present.

The main character as the writer’s alter ego

Fictional poetess Almeda Joynt Roth (1840 – 1903) reminds me of Alice Munro. First of all, the middle name of “Joynt” suggests the association. The writer and her character spring from the same land of Ontario, and from the same river, the Maitland, although in this story, Munro calls the river the Meneseteung.

Almeda is clumsy with a needle and so turns to poetry. This inability to sew appears in “Age of Faith” (Lives of Girls and Women) when junior high schooler Del prays to be released from sewing. Munro’s daughter, in Lives of Mothers and Daughters, confirms it: “That was my mother.”

In addition, the story suggests that Almeda is a born writer as much as she is a born female: that the conditions are conjoined. “There seems to be a mixture of respect and contempt for both her calling and her sex — or for their predictable conjuncture.” Munro is obviously Almeda’s mirror image: a born female and a born writer. Munro’s odd locution — “the predictable juncture” of being poetess and female — indicates what little regard men have for poetry, especially that attempted by women.

As for Almeda and Alice being alter egos, they both have a brother and a sister, and more important, they both have an incapacitated mother who is confined to her bed. In addition, they both have a beloved father who is admired for his literary interests and knowledge. Thus the things Almeda thinks about writing can easily be construed to represent, at least in part, motives and desires that Munro herself has.

Midway through the story, realizing that her period is causing her great discomfort, or realizing that Poulter himself is causing her great discomfort, Almeda locks the door against him. She takes copious amounts of the nerve tonic the doctor had prescribed to alleviate her discomfort, and she has a kind of visionary experience. She thinks of writing the “one poem that will contain everything.”

Munro remarks: “She has to think of so many things at once.”

Both Alice and Almeda share the intense desire to “think of so many things at once.” Alice Munro’s work in distinguished by a desire to represent all of the perception that reveals any composite reality. The short stories, which are almost always in disjunct sections, seem like an attempt to physically represent the way the brain works, the way society works, the way memory works, and the way we construct reality: “so many things at once.”

Almeda’s poems

Almeda’s poems are similar in style to Emily Dickinson’s: short lyrics that seemingly emphasize nature; short stanzas with lines that are 6 – 8 syllables long; an AB rhyme scheme, with the occasional off-rhyme. The outline of Emily’s life bears an uncanny resemblance to Almeda’s and Alice’s: there are the two siblings, a boy and a girl; there is the incapacitated mother and the educated father. Like Almeda, Emily refuses to marry and withdraws from conventional society, and like Almeda, Emily has a predilection for actively seeking out visionary states of mind. When you compare Emily to Alice, there is the additional commonality of their mutual rejection of conventional religion.

There is also the mutual devotion to task, the steady, regular application of time to writing. As the narrator says of Almeda: “The countryside she has written about in her poems takes diligence to see.”

There is, however, with the conjoint awareness of Almeda, Emily, and Alice, an implicit suggestion that contempt for women is not dead. The woman who finds her tongue still faces danger. Just look at the man at Google, Inc. who recently suggested that women did not have the wherewithal to do computer science, even though they were right there beside him doing it.

Almeda’s writing bears its closest similarity to Alice’s in that it is suffused with yearning and grief. While Almeda searches for her lost siblings in her poetry, Alice searches for her lost mother. Almeda’s subject, in the six poems available to us, is the past, its losses, and the desire to recapture it. One of Emily’s subjects is also loss, in her case the potential loss of God, as well as the loss of love.

In the confluence of Almeda, Emily, and Alice, Munro reaches for the sense of sorrow and isolation that can typify the female writer’s life. The only way to bear the sorrow, as Almeda tells us, is to “channel” it in writing. But Almeda makes it clear that the challenge remains: “She has to think of so many things at once”, which is what also typifies Alice. I just hope that the other is true for Munro as well, that capturing the sorrow in writing is a way to bear the sorrow.

But clearly, in the vision of the Menesteung, Almeda and Alice share a similar artistic vision: not to be limited to the merely pretty or lyric, but to encompass the whole and all the details within the whole.

Escape, intoxication, and the visionary experience

Intoxication and accusations of intoxication suffuse this story. A “drunken” woman is carried about in a wheelbarrow by thuggish children and then dumped in a ditch. A “dead-drunk” wife gets beaten up. Or, while she is very drunk, a wife is almost murdered by her husband. Or, these women are so dislocated by life or society that their disoriented behavior can only be explained if they are judged as drunk.

Almeda turns to laudanum to ostensibly relieve her menstrual cramps, but she is also relieving the pain of hearing the attack on the “drunken” woman and relieving the pain of witnessing Jarvis Pouter’s boorish disregard for her. Laudanum (opium) is a subject in the story, as well as drunkenness.

I also take it that Munro judges intoxication to be one of the few escapes women have from contempt, ridicule, or being stifled or shut up. But there is more to it; I think that Munro means to say that in certain circumstances intoxication leads to inspiration. Surely this is a rebellious and unconventional point of view.

I want to return to Emily Dickinson here and the fact that Almeda seems related to Emily. Note the Dickinson poem, “I taste liquor never brewed,” in which she calls herself, somewhat light-heartedly, an “inebriate of air” and the “debauchee of dew.” But Emily herself is known for staying up all night and deliberately seeking out the ecstatic and visionary experiences that writing through the night can induce. Dickinson had rejected conventional religion and conventional society, but her poetry reshapes religion as a quest and an exploration, and quasi-visionary experiences are part of the exploration.

Munro goes way further. “Meneseteung” recognizes that for some women, the only available withdrawal from a contemptuous society is inebriation or what looks like inebriation. For other women, finding their voice is so unacceptable that society can only explain it as drunkenness. And for elderly women, to be mad or senile may be the equivalent to being drunk.

Almeda is prescribed an opiate, the common nostrum for married women. Marriage is a topic in this story; will the wealthy miner/industrialist marry Almeda? Jarvis (the spear-master of henhouses) Poulter offers Almeda a “declaration.” But Almeda has witnessed the help he was able to give an injured woman — a poke with the boot of his toe, as if he were trying to move a “dog or a sow.” She saw him refuse the help for her of a doctor. She heard him shout at her and dismiss her. Almeda deliberately locks her door against him, thus deliberately refusing his “declaration.” She seeks out a day of intoxication via laudanum, or a day of freedom, or a day of insight.

It is during this day in an exploratory, visionary state that she realizes her poetry must “think of so many things at once.” She thinks that her poetry must be like the great river, with all its tides and changes and deeps. In this state, “she looks deep into the river of her mind.” It is the rebellious withdrawal and the drug’s visionary state that allows her access to “the river of her mind.”

Being female

Is being female being a wife? Being a beaten thing? Being confined to your bed? Or being the aged thing trundled around in a wheelbarrow? Being subject to submission and surrender? Being subject to gangs of boys? Being a menacing tongue?

Munro appears to reject all of the above as legitimate, and she instead suggests that we equate the natural cycles of the river with the natural cycles of women’s menses (as opposed to the unnatural mining of salt which is Jarvis Pouter’s business), and in so doing she associates these cycles with access to the flow of insight, creativity, and generativity.

The complexity of this story

Any number of other elements in the craft of this story are important: the significance of the names; the vivid images; the contrasting voices; the use of setting; the photographic treatment of the setting; the importance of submission; the significance of salt mines; the importance of being confined to bed; the literary father; the use of “chapters” in a short story; the use of time and on and on.

An ars poetica

one very great poem that will contain everything and make all the other poems, the poems she has written, inconsequential, mere trial and error, mere rags? Stars and flowers and birds and trees and angels in the snow and dead children at twilight — that is not the half of it. You have to get in the obscene racket on Pearl Street and the polished toe of Jarvis Poulter’s boot and the plucked-chicken haunch [of the beaten woman on Pearl Street] with its blue-black flower.

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“Five Points”
by Alice Munro
from Friend of My Youth

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Trevor

During store hours, Maria didn’t let one sort of transaction interfere with another. Everybody paid as usual. She didn’t behave any differently; she was still in charge. The boys knew they had some bargaining power, but they were never sure how much.

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]I[/fusion_dropcap]n much of her work, Alice Munro explores the transactional nature of sex, the give and take, the power positions, so well. In “Five Points” — the title of which refers to a section of town in Victoria, Canada, where some of the action takes place, but which certainly also calls to mind the five points of Calvinism, with its focus on sin and grace — there are two linked stories, each of which explores the power relationship in sex — the drive, the carnality, the fall, the abuse.

The primary story involves Brenda, a married woman who is having an affair with Neil based on lust and the rush of freedom from the ever-increasing complexity of her relationship with her husband Cornelius.

The secondary story, significantly darker than and embedded in the primary story, is about Maria, a thirteen-year-old girl who first pays boys to have sex with her and then loses everything when the young boys usurp her power. Neil knew Maria when he was about her same age, and he is the one telling the story to Brenda, little knowing that it will be a piece of their own transaction and reevaluation of the services being rendered.

I think “Five Points” is a fascinating story. On the surface it is relatively straightforward. The two stories are, for example, easy to summarize, and their relationship is not difficult to suss out. However, this is a story about what goes on the outskirts and below the surface. Munro makes this rather explicit, letting Cornelius tell us about what it was like when he used to work in a mine that went under the lake:

It’s a world of its own, he says — caverns and pillars, miles out under the lake. If you get in a passage where there are no machines to light the gray walls, the salt-dusty air, and you turn your headlamp off, you can find out what real darkness is like, the darkness people on the surface of the earth never get to see.

Munro is again showing us that the simple is anything but, that there are many more potential tunnels than we can ever follow, each going deeper into the lives, deeper into darkness. Most people prefer to look on the surface. But in this deepening, relationships that seemed straightforward even to the characters (and, we recognize, in our own lives) grow in complexity and, in these instances, burdens and abuse.

We see Brenda and Maria embark on a new and, at the time, light phase. The sex feels cheap if not free. But they each enter a new phase. For neither is it hopeful, though Brenda recognizes it is rather inevitable, and doesn’t necessarily mean the end:

He has lost some of his sheen for her; he may not get it back. Probably the same goes for her, with him. She feels his heaviness and anger and surprise. She feels that also in herself. She thinks that up till now it was easy.

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Betsy

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]“F[/fusion_dropcap]ive Points” initially struck me as thin, not to mention that I was also repelled by its hopelessness.  An attractive woman with a disabled husband is having an affair with a customer she’s picked up in her second-hand store. Brenda and Neil meet in his trailer for sex; it is isolated, not particularly clean, and way down a long dirt road. Although they do nothing together but drink and have sex, the woman looks forward to their meetings as if they were a “ceremony on which [her] life or salvation depended.”

Pretty thin salvation, the reader notes. Pretty grim. So much for free love, flower power, and all the other nostrums of the 60’s.

As is almost a constant in Munro, there is a companion story: Neil tells Brenda how, when he was 15 or so, a slatternly immigrant teenager named Maria, old beyond her years, ended up paying 15-year old boys for sex. The boys then used the money to buy drugs, drugs having suddenly proliferated, it being the 70s. Neil does not leave out how Maria ended up in such a mess. He tries, in a kind of atonement, to tell the whole story. Though Munro doesn’t say so, Maria’s central European parents seem to be in a kind of shock, and in their frozen state, they neglect and use her. The father does almost nothing in the store, the mother does all the baking, the pretty little sister does her homework, and Maria runs the money. If one were looking for a patriarchal society run amok in miniature, there it is. The havoc of immigration has reduced the father to nothing, and slovenly, unloved, and untended Maria takes his rightful place in the business.

Neil’s “salvation” is obviously the amnesia that drugs offer (another false nostrum of the 60s), although he also appears to crave the release of confession.

As always, the story plays out in complicated layers. The first layer is in the reverberation created by the two plot lines and the details of the two plot lines. The two stories, for instance, both involve an exaggerated patriarchy that cracks under the strain. We find out that when very young, Brenda married a man 12 years her senior, as if she purposely had picked out a father figure, as if the man had purposely picked out a teenager/child bride.  Brenda tells Neil that her father had slapped her when he heard she tried some pot, but this is a lie. It was actually her fiancée who had slapped her. And she still married him, as if the slap had sealed the deal. She had gone out of her way to choose a man to be her patriarch, and then, with his injury at work, things are turned upside down, and she is suddenly the one who has to be “responsible.”

Patriarchy in the Maria layer plays into patriarchy in Brenda’s marriage. Maria’s father, having been uprooted and perhaps reduced as an immigrant, plays the lord, ruining his wife and oldest daughter in the process. Cornelius also plays the lord, only to be reduced by accident. Ironically, both men get to keep a kind of lordly, do-nothing status. At first, only the women are enslaved. By the end, however, things have flipped, and both Maria and Brenda are assuming the role of the patriarchy, with the men and boys are at their beck and call. The reduction of the men is painful; the hollowed out women are repulsive. Reflect, however, that the women have merely flipped the patriarchal equation.

In the background of these two stories is the salt mine that runs under Lake Huron. Munro never says so, but we all recognize the salt mine as a particular site of ancient misery. Despite the fact that the mine ruined him, Cornelius loves the power it represents, the immense machines, the huge labyrinth, the dangerous work. To me, the mine mirrors the labyrinthine effects of patriarchy: the danger, the slavery, the ossification that the salt of the mine and the rules of the patriarchy represent. In addition, the mine represents a kind of calcified mind lurking beneath the lake of daily life. Cornelius says the dark in the mine is like no other, and that parts of it are as sealed as a tomb.

As any good icon can, the mine also is a riff on the way people think they can seal off parts of themselves, or seal off lies, or seal off deception.

Brenda thinks of her relationship with Neil as a kind of dream, and in her mind, “there’s a whole underground system that you call ‘dreams,’ having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar — where you are now, where you’ve always been.” Brenda takes the image of the mine and makes it alive, except that the word “coiling” makes her metaphor ominous. In addition, Brenda does not distinguish between the dreams you have while sleeping or the dreams, or ambitions, you have while awake. Yes, surely, we connect sexuality with sleep and with sleeping dreams, but Brenda also thinks of her relationship with Neil as a waking dream. As an ambition, Neil is so unpromising as to be a warning, regardless that he and Brenda have a language and history of “passion.” The reader can’t help but think this dream-world of Brenda’s is a dead-end, like the salt mine. While Brenda craves the “sap” of the men she pursues, she “notices that [her lover’s] voice is nearly as flat and tired as her own.”

In both stories, the natural order is up-ended, and to no good effect. Maria, the teenager, is acting the adult by running the store, but in so doing she plays the old witch. Brenda, the housewife in her thirties, is acting the teenager, but in doing so is playing run-around-Sue, and simultaneously criticizing her daughter for being the teenager the real teenager actually is.

Neil describes what happened in the 60s and 70s as “the change”: the sex, the drugs, the teenagers on their own, the oldsters playing at being kids. It’s bizarre to hear him using the locution society uses to name the time which marks the end (“the change”), for women, of their fertility. It’s as if life in the Americas had suddenly dried up. Munro is not romantic about the wild changes of the 70s. There’s a hard-boiled attitude toward the revolutions of the 70s at work here and in many of her other stories, in which the revolution does not appear uniformly benevolent.

Another layer in this story is created by the title: “Five Points.” Ostensibly, it is the place Neil grew up, the poor neighborhood he fled when he was sixteen.

Many Canadians might also be familiar with the phrase as the “Five Points” of Calvinism, the original backbone of Presbyterianism, the most dominant Protestant strain in Canada. The Five Points of Calvinism include the idea that only some people are saved (the elect), and that Christ’s atonement was limited to those who were saved. Thus a strictly Calvinist church does not believe in the possibility of salvation for all. Munro does not, I think, mean to refer to these ideas in any strict manner but more as a setting for the sense of unrelieved and hopeless sin that Neil feels.

Calvinism is obviously another sealed tomb like the salt mine — a place where you work and think you are powerful. But the machines of Calvinism are as dangerous and as paralyzing as the machines in the salt mine.

While a search for salvation is a theme in this story, Munro is almost never comfortable with the organized church as place where salvation either occurs or is sparked. Instead, Munro’s characters often seek to appropriate religious ritual to their own ends, or to even create their own ritual. Hence, Brenda sees her trysts with Neil and her “salvation,” but Munro clearly means us to see what a bleak salvation it is.

Neil ends his story about Maria, and how he was one of the boys who took money from her, by saying, “I wasn’t looking to confess it [. . . ] I just wanted to talk about it.” He goes on to admit, “Then what pisses me off is I lied anyway.” We are not sure, here, whether what he means is that he lied at first about taking money from Maria, or whether in fact that his denial he had sex with her is true either. What we do know is that he ran away shortly thereafter, and that he lives the drifter’s life, seemingly unattached to family or any particular woman. So by the time the story ends, we know what Neil has denied: he does want to confess, he does want forgiveness, and he does want to rejoin the world of ordinary human interaction. He pleads with Brenda, “Christ, don’t get out yet!”

The life that Neil and Brenda manage to accomplish through sex feels as if it might be salvation, that they might be each other’s Christ, but the reader knows they have a long way to go beyond sex before salvation could enter into it.

One of the casualties of the seventies was ordinary religion. I doubt that church now holds the sway in Canada it did a hundred years ago. It’s as if Christ and his salvation were now entombed in history (and Calvinism) the way the company sealed up the giant machines in the caverns of the mine.

One of the hopes of the seventies was that we could save each other. Munro echoes that with Brenda thinking of her trysts with Neil as ceremonies of her “salvation.” But in order to fulfill her responsibilities to her husband, she needs to keep Neil separate. It’s as if the trailer where they meet is like a sealed cavern in a mine. Neil, however, needs more than just “ceremonies” of salvation. He needs actual salvation, perhaps of the kind that ordinary human relationships can offer. But something in him is broken, and he seems an unlikely candidate, at this point, for a turnaround.

This brings me to the issue of prostitution. The story, which is topsy-turvy in every way (think Brenda hiding from her daughter the way a teenager hides from her mother), has Maria being the John who pays for sex. Brenda, in this story, is also the John who prostitutes the men she meets, prostitutes them by keeping them so ceremonially separate, such that she would not have to feel “responsible” for him. The name Brenda, in fact, was originally a man’s name (Brendr, meaning sword). So Brenda and Maria act the man, Neil and the boys act the woman, act the prostitute, thus acting out “the change” that Neil described. The exchange works no better when the sexes are reversed: all are demeaned and “flattened.”

Gloria Steinem famously said that marriage was just legalized prostitution. Brenda’s marriage is more like slavery, her husband a “bulk settling down possessively like a ton of blankets.” If Brenda’s marriage to the salt-mine-worker is like legalized prostitution, it has ended up having none of the benefits of marriage itself.

A very bizarre note in this story (whether  Munro intended it or not) is a slang allusion within the title that five points can refer to a sex between a woman and five men. Both Neil and Brenda’s sexual history is conflicted: Brenda could have easily serially had five men; Neil was certainly one of many boys who used Maria. Neil’s story is vague and incorporates at least one lie, such that what really transpired between Maria and the boys is not clear. He says it was one boy at a time, but they are referred to as a group, and once the door to the shed is closed, it’s not clear how many people are in there. The story concerns the cavernous emptiness that is possible between women and men, whether it be in marriage, casual flings, affairs, prostitution or pornography. As for Brenda, the lie is how many Neil’s she has had in this aftermath of Cornelius’s accident (Cornelius, who now, on a bad day, can spend a whole day lying on the floor in front of the television, presumably in the deadened embrace of some Percocet of his own).

The story’s clear allusion to prostitution suggests the dead zone that Neil and Brenda inhabit, regardless of the “sap” that Brenda hopes to suck from him. The deadness of their relationship is intensified by the image of the salt mine where Brenda like to troll. She says she “loves the smell of work on their bodies, the language of it they speak, their absorption in it, their disregard of her. She loves to get a man fresh from all that.” And flush with the money they make, I think the story suggests. But the emptiness and danger of the salt mine are the image of her relationships.

Drugs were part of the seventies revolution, and Neil still has his stash: “Percs, Quaaludes and a little hash.” This is what Neil wants to have after sex. Quaaludes are a sedative and a hypnotic. Percocet is an oxycodone concoction, and this is only the 1990s. Neil thinks of them as nothing, but as we all know, oxycodone is no nothing, and I think Munro knows that, too. He’s talking opioid, he’s talking narcotic, he’s talking obliteration. As if after sex he needs to make his own mind an empty cavern.

So what are Munro’s purposes here? Maybe to see if she can capture, without lecturing, the topsy-turvy bad effects of “the change” the world went through in the 70s. There’s no neat way to sum this story up: there is too much suffering. Neil and Cornelius probably can’t get through the day without drugs. Neil and Brenda can’t get through the day without lying. The teenagers are all on their own. Relationships exist in sealed tombs, and there is a purposelessness to the endeavor of being alive.

Brenda enjoys herself, but for how long? She runs a second-hand shop, and she has made of herself a second-hand girl. When she herself hits “the change,” what will she have?

In “Hold me Fast, Don’t let me Pass” the indomitable Hazel says, “[T]here came a time when she had to take hold of her life, and she has urged the same course in others. She urges action, exercise, direction.” Brenda needs a Hazel to break in, but even if Hazel did break in, would Brenda be able to listen? Some people feel their life upon them as a weight so heavy it’s like “a ton of blankets.” For some people, the situation is such that there’s very little hope.

“Five Points” asks: if the salt has lost its flavor what is a man to do?

Munro famously employs “the intervention of fate” to galvanize people. One is left with the sense that both Neil and Brenda need an intervention of fate. Brenda needs to be revealed by her daughter, or discovered by a neighbor, or startled some way, back to life. But that story is left for the reader to write.

For some people in Munro’s universe, the situation is just too overwhelming. It’s like being imprisoned in your own life, as Munro says of the mother in “Friend of my Youth.”

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“Friend of My Youth”
by Alice Munro
from Friend of My Youth

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Trevor

O God, why hast thou cast us off for ever? why doth thine anger smoke against the sheep of thy pasture?
     ~Psalm 74

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]C[/fusion_dropcap]an someone be confident they have been disillusioned? Right at the start of Alice Munro’s beautiful, complex “Friend of My Youth,” we see the first of several apparent disillusionments. The narrator (we never do learn this daughter’s name) is telling us about some dreams she used to have where her dead mother forgives her. However, she recognizes that the dreams are an illusion, and so:

The dream stopped, I suppose because it was too transparent in its hopefulness, too easy in its forgiveness.

In the dream, there is a sense of recovery that, she recognizes, is false. And yet, this story is yet another attempt — albeit one not so simple as a dream — to find some sense, some relief, even some hope for impossible forgiveness. At best, though, perhaps we can only recognize that life is complicated. Perhaps we escape one illusion and seek solace in another.

After the brief introduction to the narrator and to her mother who has been dead for decades, the story shifts to the past when her mother was building her trousseau and working for a strange family home. There she met Flora, her sister Ellie, and Ellie’s husband Robert. They are strict Cameronians (I didn’t know what this meant, neither did the narrator or her mother, but it is sussed out in the story). The home has no electricity, there is no dancing, and certainly no work on Sunday. Also, strangely, the home had been divided; Robert and Ellie had half, for their family that never happened, and Flora had the other half.

Flora and the narrator’s mother become friends. Flora accepts life’s disappointments and seems happy and convivial. She doesn’t even hold the narrator’s mother to her religious standards. However, it doesn’t take long before the awful story of the past comes out: Flora and Robert were engaged to be married, but, well, he had to marry Ellie instead.

So here we have a single woman, living in half of her own home, watching her fiancé begin life with her little sister. That life doesn’t get far, though, because Ellie is never well and, eventually, her demise is inevitable. Nurse Atkinson, a judgmental, disrespectful woman, moves in to escort Ellie to her death. Engaged herself, soon the narrator’s mother moves away and begins her own family, but before long news comes: Ellie has died, and Robert has married Nurse Atkinson. It’s shocking and terrible, yet just look at this response Flora sends to the narrator’s mother to chastise her for writing what was intended to be a consoling letter:

Back came a letter from Flora saying that she did not know where my mother had been getting her information, but that it seemed she had misunderstood, or listened to malicious people, or jumped to unjustified conclusions. What happened in Flora’s family was nobody else’s business, and certainly nobody needed to feel sorry for her or angry on her behalf. Flora said she was happy and satisfied with her life, as she always had been, and she did not interfere with what others did or wanted, because such things did not concern her. She wished my mother all happiness in her marriage and hoped that she would soon be too busy with her own responsibilities to worry about the lives of people that she used to know.

“Friend of My Youth” becomes more complicated than it already is when the narrator begins to step away from Flora’s situation and instead focuses on the presentation of that situation. Everything we’ve heard has come from her mother (interestingly, with Robert always sitting quietly in the shadows). The narrator and her mother had a wedge driven between them when — and maybe prior to — her mother got sick and started to deteriorate. At a moment when she should be giving comfort, the narrator instead pulled away. Why? Maybe for many reasons, but primarily because she couldn’t handle her mother’s ways of dealing with her pain and her imminent death. She hates how her mother sought some kind of comfort in what she considers to be “a great fog of platitudes and pieties lurking,” and this connects to Flora’s story, where Flora seems to be presented as a saint:

The wicked flourish. But it is all right. It is all right — the elect are veiled in patience and humility and lighted by certainty that events cannot disturb.

That’s all too easy for the narrator, the world view to trite, one that might even accept forgiveness in dreams. So, rather than offer comfort her mother desperately sought (even writing letters with no hope for reply to people she used to know, to the mysterious “Friend of My Youth”), the narrator takes a stand and withdraws entirely. Her mother dies, presumably alone. Now, years later, the narrator has not escaped. The dream only ever offered slight comfort, and now even that has been unmasked as just too simple to even feel.

Munro masterfully has her narrator look to her mother’s tale, the tale of Flora. Her mother, it appears, at one time wanted to be an author, and she hoped to write Flora’s story. With bitterness, the narrator thinks she knows exactly what kind of story it would be: saintly Flora, wicked Nurse Atkinson, the danger of sex. The narrator’s version: Flora is the wicked one, the one who scorned, the one who held on to some false tradition and didn’t take control over her own life and domain, the one who had an aversion to sex.

The narrator feels disillusioned here as well, but she recognizes that: “The odd thing is that my mother’s ideas were in line with some progressive notions of her times, and mine echoed the notions that were favored in mine.” How can she know just what is going on? Her version of Flora’s story is just as false as her mothers. All she seems to know as the story comes to an end is that none of the sources of comfort, the various ways of seeing the world, have yielded any real solace. The last we know of Flora is that she left the house. Did she leave her religion, too? Did she forsake anything in leaving?

Significantly and curiously given this story, Munro dedicated Friend of My Youth is dedicated: “To the memory of my mother.”

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Betsy

1

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]“F[/fusion_dropcap]riend of my Youth” is a series of nesting stories: a frame story about a writer who yearns for forgiveness from her mother; another frame story about a Scottish Presbyterian who murdered a bishop and thus engendered a religious sect; an interior story about two provincial sisters; an interior dialogue regarding the nature of ideology; and another interior dialogue regarding the truth of fiction.

What makes you turn the pages is the central story, a ballad tale of forlorn, hapless, and ghastly love.

The narrator’s mother was a newly hatched elementary teacher who had to board with a family, in this case, the Grieves. It was a peculiar arrangement: the teacher boarded in a half of the house belonging to Flora, a fierce “maiden lady” of almost 40. Flora’s sister Ellie lived in the other side of the house with her husband Robert. Flora had energy and “cheerfulness,” despite belonging to a forbidding religious sect. Her sister Ellie was gloomy and bed-ridden, the victim of two still-born babies and numerous miscarriages. Flora did all the housework on the place with a kind of endless energy and “the cleanliness was devastating.” Spring would have her attacking the whole place. She had a self-possession not unlike a “gypsy queen,” and it is clear from Mother’s description that Flora’s wonderful cheekbones and long legs and “bold serenity” made her beautiful. She would ride to town on market days standing in the back of the cart while Ellie’s husband drove. Quite a presence. Quite a sight. Like a virgin queen/like a goddess.

“The story of Flora and Ellie and Robert had been told — or all that people knew of it — in various versions,” says the narrator. But the core of it was this: wild Ellie, who was maybe not quite right in the head, was devoted to Flora. When Flora came to be engaged to Robert, Ellie, who was a wild 16 year old, commenced to make a big “commotion.” There was howling and vomiting, the signs of pregnancy, as well as Robert’s necessary marriage to Ellie instead of Flora. Dead babies, sad miscarriages, bed-ridden Ellie, and Flora the constant nurse-maid was the result.

What’s not clear is whether wild Ellie is actually having these pregnancies, or whether they are “phantom pregnancies,” whether some or all of the household in the black house were folie à deux (between Flora and Ellie) or a menage à trois (which included Robert). It’s not clear whether Flora is a self-sacrificing saint or someone who has managed to have her cake and eat it too. Which version is true? Sexless Flora? Or Sexless Ellie? Good Robert? Or bad Robert? Not clear at all, not to the neighbors and not to the reader.

During her mother’s stay at the Grieves house, Ellie begins to actually die, and a nurse arrives, a nurse who trails her own set of stories and questions. Audrey smokes, has marcelled hair, and a “smart” car. People wondered if she had tricked old fools into changing their wills to her benefit. Wild Ellie is now trapped by illness and corralled by Audrey. Audrey takes charge and says things like, “That’s what [invalids] are like, they only think about themselves.”

By the time Ellie dies, the narrator’s mother is married and settled down 300 miles away. So it’s only by letter that she hears of the scandal: Audrey is to marry Robert, and in fact, the scandals do not stop. Electricity is put into the house for the first time, and Audrey’s half is painted “cream with dark-green trim,” while Flora’s half remains black and unpainted. A louche party is held to celebrate the wedding and Audrey behaves in a bold and unladylike manner. Mother writes Flora a commiserative letter, offering “sympathy and outrage.” A “well-written” letter arrives in return that “cuts [Mother . . .] to the quick,” telling Mother, essentially, to mid her own business.

Who wrote that letter? Nonetheless, the friendship breaks down, and Mother does not communicate any more with any of them.

Strangely, years later, Mother gets a letter from Flora, saying she is healthy, has moved to town, is still friendly with Robert and Audrey, and has become a clerk. She is a little like Violet, in “A Queer Streak.” Mother’s own health was not so good, and by this time her once-fine handwriting was not so good either. The narrator says there were a lot of wistful scraps of half-begun letters to various old friends “lying around the house,” but not one to Flora. It was as if Mother was disappointed in Flora not living up to the stories she had made up about her.

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[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]A[/fusion_dropcap]s the narrator has said, the locals had various versions of the mysterious story. True to form, the narrator and her mother also have competing versions. Mother confides to the narrator that she would have liked to have written Flora’s story, and she would have called it, The Maiden Lady, indicating that she knows or senses the real truth: that Flora is a saint. By this time Mother has become a “prisoner” in her own life, and the narrator felt “a great fog of platitudes and pieties lurking” in the threat of this story. The daughter feels that if she herself were to tell this story, it would be very different than the one Mother would tell. Mother would make Flora the betrayed and victimized saint-heroine, and the narrator would make of her a sex-less evil. Of course, the narrator was only 15 at the time she was making up her version.

As an adult, the narrator herself has tried to make up a variety of endings for Flora’s story. But in the end, she comes to see that her own stories would be no nearer the truth than her mother’s.

Munro makes sure to emphasize the danger of the traps life lays for us: the way we may be ultimately misunderstood, the way we are subject to other people’s rumors and gossip, the way we are subject to the fads of our times, possibly even made prisoner by the fads of our times.

Mother, for instance, was a “modern” woman for her time, a college girl and a teacher. But she was also subject to the feminist ideas of the time: that women should not be prisoners of sex, or prisoners of motherhood, and that a certain disinterest in, and distance from, sex was to be preferred. Mother thus saw Flora as a saint and Ellie as a vixen who got what she had coming. The narrator, on the other hand, was a daughter of the swinging fifties, and she saw Flora, with all her chilly aversion to men, as the witch. And then there’s the reader, who wonders if Flora had somehow managed to choose the life she wanted as a modern day Diana. (And then, there’s this ultimately contemporary idea that maybe she’d gotten to have Robert anyway, but on her own terms and with none of the being ordered around by him.)

This idea that we can be a prisoner of ideology is magnified by the Cameronian frame. Flora and Robert and Ellie were “Cameronians,” a strict group of Presbyterians who did not dance or play cards, and who attended a church that liked hours-long sermons and eschewed stained glass windows and instrumental music. The idea here is that sexuality for Robert and Ellie and Flora is warped by religious belief, and that sexuality for Mother is warped by her contemporary blue-stocking beliefs.

The issue for the narrator is not so clear because we know almost nothing about her as an adult. Would her vision be warped by contemporary beliefs about self-expression, flower power, and free love? Munro is never devoted to the idea that sexual experimentation and carrying-on leads to great happiness.

3

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]I[/fusion_dropcap]n “Friend of My Youth,” the frame story revisits the theme of the resentful, rebellious teenager who feels trapped by a dying, demanding and opinionated mother. What would be ordinary resistance in a teen is exaggerated by the burden of having to save her mother; what would be ordinary assuredness in a mother is exaggerated by the tragedy of the mother’s illness. In fact, this story has its origins in Munro’s own mother, brave in her youth, but broken by Parkinson’s by her fifties, while Munro was still a teen. In this story, while the mother was being gradually imprisoned by the disease, and making almost intolerable pleas for “love and pity,” the girl holds herself stubborn and aloof.

Of course her refusals later caused the narrator to yearn for forgiveness.

The story captures the reader right off with its yearning; the narrator tells us she had often dreamed of her mother being vigorous and healthy, having maybe only a touch of illness. And in these dreams, her mother was kind, lightly remarking, “I was sure I’d see you some day.” From this, though, we realize that the girl had moved on and had not returned, just as Munro herself had left and not returned for the final stage of her mother’s illness.

The narrator says, however, that the dreams were a hoax, a wish-fulfillment, an alternative truth. The dreams, of course, are a kind of story-telling, and the role and purpose of story-telling is another theme that Munro revisits. How much truth is there to be had in story-telling?

For instance, she tells us that although she loves to imagine alternative endings for a particular person, she also knows that that woman would “weary of it, of me and my idea about her, my information, my notion that I can know anything about her.”

So, what is the purpose of story-telling if you can’t really know anything about another person?

What she does not say, but what the reader sees, is that while she cannot necessarily know the truth about others, she can know some things about herself through the stories she writes. The narrator sees that the dream-stories offer a great yearned-for relief from the fact that she had not loved her mother as her mother would have liked. The mother’s “astonishing lighthearted forgiveness” is a terrific relief.

But she remarks that if her mother had not ever gotten sick, if she had not been trapped in the prison of her illness, the narrator would have never experienced her own “bitter lump of love.” “Lump,” here, adjoined to “love,” is disconcerting. Lump makes me think of a growing cancer. Lump also makes me think of a bit of leavened bread saved for the purpose of making the next loaf. Both of these images make me think of all the stories the writer mines from the experience of her mother’s illness. Munro herself compares the lump to a pregnancy, but if the mother had never been sick the daughter’s “bitter” lump of love would never have been; it would have been “something useless and uncalled for, like a phantom pregnancy.”

I have to wonder, however, whether in the almost tortured use of the idea of pregnancy in this story, whether Munro means the reader to understand the real living and haunted daughter as the recipient of bitter love, as the blighted and unfinished gestation of a mother, and as “phantom” herself, so completely is she haunted by the mother’s demands that she cannot fulfil.

What I have just described is the frame of “Friend of My Youth,” the beginning and end, or almost-the-end. The frame allows for N to pose her desire at the outset: her need for her mother’s forgiveness. The frame then allows for the narrator to admit at the end that she needs the knowledge of her own “bitter lump”: that which is real. It is as if writing the story provides access to what miserable amount of love she was able to feel . . . not enough, for sure, but still, a variety of love.

On the one hand, the writer nurtures herself by weaving as many threads into this story about truth and love as possible. And on the other, she “loves” her mother by trying to see her as she truly was. What the rest of the story does accomplish is a re-union between mother and daughter; the daughter experiences not forgiveness, but simply, re-union.

The story within the frame of “Friend of My Youth” is a ballad tale of forlorn, hapless, and ghastly love. The question is, how does the one story inform the other? Explain or enrich the other? Make the other more profound? Maybe only that on the one hand, the writer admits that story telling is sometimes inadequate to the task of telling the truth: that the truth is so multifarious that attempting to tell it is akin to having a phantom pregnancy. And on the other, story-telling is a means to flashes of recognition. The narrator remarks about her battles with her mother’s views of sex:

The odd thing is that my mother’s ideas were in line with some progressive notions of her times, and mine echoed the notions that were favored in my time. This in spite of the fact that we both believed ourselves independent [. . .]. It’s as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in on spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.

What can we make of this tale within a tale within a tale within a tale? (Cameronians murder the bishop in the seventeenth century; mother has an adventure out in the Ottawa Valley but later develops Parkinson’s; her daughter yearns to be forgiven by her mother; two sisters are trapped in servitude to each other; writer considers the traps that ideologies lay for seemingly independent people; writer wonders where the truth is in fiction.) So while the frame story of “Friend of my Youth” is about a yearning for forgiveness, the interior story, the ballad tale, is about sex, about rebellion, about being trapped, and about independence.

Post Script

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]A[/fusion_dropcap]s for the title “Friend of My Youth,” I think it is the mystery of it that is significant. This “friend” could have been a man, for all we know! It could have been Robert! The narrator notices that “[h]e never has a word to say.” Mother mentions Robert not at all, does not quote him, does not describe him, does not tell his story. He is the true blank at the center of this story, as the narrator points out, which, in fact, makes of him a rather looming presence. We do not know who is the real friend of Mother’s youth, and it is this fact that is the second true thing we know about this story.

The real issue for the narrator is whether or not she can perceive the truth. She realizes Flora might well mock the “endings” that the narrator cooks up. She also realizes that her dreams about her mother’s forgiveness are way too hopeful. In a strangely worded construction, she says that if her mother were indeed to forgive her, it would make of her “bitter lump of love” something unreal, like a “phantom pregnancy.” The fact is, all of Ellie’s pregnancies may have been fake. We’ll never know. Time makes the truth almost unknowable.

But in fact, it is the narrator’s bitter lump of love that is the one knowable and true thing in this story.

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