Daily Blague

Now that I've read not one but two collections, Runaway and its much-admired predecessor, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Knopf, 2004 and Vintage, 2001), I know enough to know better than to attempt any kind of summing up, to presume to distill the experience of reading Alice Munro into a few paragraphs. That sort of thing will have to wait. This is just a beginning, something to come back to as the stories age and darken in my mind. The first thing to say is that Mr Franzen's sketch of the almost invariable Munro back-story, some part of which figures in each story, can't be improved upon -

Here's the story that Munro keeps telling: A bright, sexually avid girl grows up in rural Ontario without much money, her mother is sickly or dead, her father is a schoolteacher whose second wife is problematic, and the girl, as soon as she can, escapes from the hinterland by way of a scholarship or some decisive self-interested act. She marries young, moves to British Columbia, raises kids, and is far from blameless in the breakup of her marriage. She may have success as an actress or a writer or a TV personality; she has romantic adventures. When, inevitably, she returns to Ontario, she finds the landscape of her youth unsettlingly altered. Although she was the one who abandoned the place, it's a great blow to her narcissism that she isn't warmly welcomed back -- that the world of her youth, with its older-fashioned manners and mores, now sits in judgment on the modern choices she has made. Simply by trying to survive as a whole and independent person, she has incurred painful losses and dislocations; she has caused harm.

- except, of course, by Ms Munro herself. The miracle of it all is that knowing this template in advance actually makes each individual story richer. The variations are always intriguing. The first marriage, for example, doesn't always break up. In "What Is Remembered" (HFCLM), you're surprised that it doesn't. Meriel and Pierre are still young when Pierre's childhood friend, Jonas, dies, and Meriel has a bit of an adventure after the funeral. Pierre is not a sympathetic character, but then the husbands in Ms Munro's stories rarely are. Few are as unlikable as Mr Vorguilla, in "Queenie" (HFCLM), but all are presented in the full flower of masculine egoism. Years later, after Pierre dies a natural death (which his wilder friend certainly did not), Meriel remembers, for the first time, that the man with whom she had spent a few illicit hours refused to kiss her goodbye. Had she remembered it earlier, she muses, her marriage might not have endured, as if responding to the lover's challenging denial were the only way to grow. Most of Ms Munro's women make the mistake of so responding. They may find happier second husbands, but not in the men for whom they leave their first.

If I linger over "What Is Remembered," it's because of a paragraph that comes early in the story.

Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn, so quickly. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives. How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, as well as the jobs that had to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century. It was the women, then, who could slip back - during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of the children - into a kind of second adolescence. A lightening of spirits when the husbands departed. Dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits that were a throwback to high school, mushrooming between the walls that the husband was paying for, in the hours when he wasn't there.

This becomes more extraordinary every time I go over it. I'd give anything to have written "youthful necks in knotted ties" - it sounds like Wallace Stevens - and the combination of "how to kowtow to bosses" with "how to manage wives" produces a vital insight of almost scientific weight: it captures exactly how young married men used to see their worlds, and in many cases still do. The resentment and contempt that must have accompanied these observations when they were fresh has been softened and detoxified, but their outline remains palpable. 

The failings of women are hardly elided; on the contrary, they're seen in such high detail that at first it's easy to mistake them for more neutral characteristics. As I made my way through Runaway, I came to see that the heroines who were having such hard times were hardly angels. The trio of "Juliet" stories in Runaway give the best example. (They appeared all together in The New Yorker's Summer Fiction Issue, where, once again, I didn't read them; when I was cutting up old magazines the other day I was rather repelled by the dirty photographs. I still assume that my long-late great-aunt Marion is a subscriber.) In the first story, Juliet is a young woman about to pay a visit to a married man whom she met on a cross-country train; their meeting, deeply enfolded in what might have been another story altogether, takes up a good deal of the tale, and the rest covers Juliet's arrival, some time later, in the remote coastal town where the man is a fisherman. Because Juliet is intelligent and well-behaved, she has our sympathy from the start, and she never really does anything to lose it. After all, what's so bad about giving a pushy stranger the brush-off on a long train ride. What's wrong about cherishing the letter that another, rather desirable, stranger writes to her when she gets to where she is going? And why not take the opportunity paying him a visit before she leaves his part of Canada forever? Having read all three stories, I'd have to say: more than you'd think.

What's wrong leaks out slowly, and not in "Chance," the first of the stories, the events of which I've lightly summarized. It begins to surface in the second story, "Soon," which takes place four years later. Juliet has had a child, Penelope, with the stranger - his name is Eric - but they have not married. This is not a problem for Juliet, but when she pays a visit to her parents, back in Ontario, when Penelope is a little over a year old, she finds that her marital status has had repercussions for her father. He has in fact quit his job as a schoolteacher, and taken up market-gardening.

"Did it have anything all to do with me?"

"I quit because I got goddamn sick of my neck always in that noose. I was on the point of quitting for years."

"It had nothing to do with me?"

"All right," Sam said. "I got into an argument. There were things said."

"What things?"

"You don't need to know.

"And don't worry," he said after a moment. "They didn't fire me. They couldn't have fired me. There are rules. It's like I told you - I was ready to go anyway."

"But you don't realize," said Juliet. "You don't realize. You don't realize just how stupid this is and what a disgusting place this is to live in, where people say that kind of thing, and how if I told people I know this, they wouldn't believe it. It would seem like a joke."

"Well. Unfortunately, your mother and I don't live where you live. Here is where we live. Does that fellow of yours think it's a joke too? I don't want to talk any more about this tonight, I'm going to bed. I'm going to look in on Mother and then I'm going to bed."

"The passenger train - ," said Juliet with continued energy, even scorn. "It does still stop here. Doesn't it? You didn't want me getting off here. Did you?"

On his way out of the room, her father did not answer.

Juliet is alluding to the fact that her parents arranged to pick her up at a station twenty miles away. Now she understands why, and she's angry about it. One's first reaction might be to sympathize with Juliet. It is the late Sixties, and Juliet is simply a woman struggling for personal freedom. Her parent's townspeople are narrow-minded and old-fashioned; they're conventional and probably hypocritical. But by the end of the "Silence," the last of the three stories, I was inclined to reconsider my judgment, if not my sympathies. In her anger, she lumps her father together with his antagonists: she raises her voice at him. Having taken a step toward liberation, she expects everyone else to follow.

Does this make Juliet "bad" or unsympathetic? No more so than any of us, and that may be the miracle of Alice Munro's writing. If you are expecting dramatic confrontations between good and evil, she will certainly disappoint you. Her dramatic confrontations involve people in whom virtue and vice are admixed to much the same degree, and our preferring one to another - preferring Juliet, in this case, to whomever it was that Sam got into a fight with - then we are only revealing a preference among vices. We prefer self-centered intelligence to hidebound unreflectiveness. We prefer individuality to tradition, and - this is where our vice comes in - we have nothing but scorn for those who think differently. We don't want to believe that Juliet ought to be held responsible for the end of her father's teaching career. She is certainly not solely responsible. But she shares in the responsibility. Her unwillingness to acknowledge this stands in even higher relief at the end of the story, when, looking back, she remembers with pain her blocked inability to give her dying mother the small comfort of a simple "Yes."

So it is not altogether surprising to discover, a few pages into "Silence," that the now grown Penelope does not want to see Juliet for the time being. Juliet has become a successful television personage in the Vancouver area, and a widow of sorts as well, after Eric's death in a storm at sea. She believes that she and Penelope are very close, and is more puzzled than anything else when Penelope decides to spend some time at the Spiritual Balance Centre on Denman Island. Six months later, Juliet insists on a visit, but when she arrives at the Centre, an officious woman with a baloney smile tells her that Penelope "isn't there."

In the wake of September 11, 2001, my daughter and I hit a rough patch that it took me a long time to get out of, or, perhaps I should say, even to begin to figure out how to get out of. I had to learn, among other things, something very bitter: that, although I love my daughter, I haven't listened to her very well, and in fact I have often wished that she would say altogether different things. And this had to change. I suspect that this is common among strong-minded parents, but don't think I'm letting myself off. I am in any case grateful to have had the chance at making a beginning. I say all this because Juliet is denied that chance, and if I had read her story during the rough times, it would have killed me. That's to say that it would have been intolerable; I might have given up on my love for my daughter. Juliet has done nothing specific to push her daughter away, but in taking her company and her affection for granted, she has perhaps ceased to be at all attractive. We soon learn not to care for people who believe, quite wrongly, that they have us all figured out.

Alice Munro's stories strike a note of ambivalence that is easy to mistake for inactivity, but once you have heard it, you will hear it sounding everywhere.