Judith Maclean Miller
On Looking into Rifts and Crannies.- Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth
"It's absolutely true, " she said, "my books are thick with thepresence of other books, butifeelthat out there in the worldthere must be otherpeople who read as passionately as Ido and actually know that books constantly interweave themselves with other books and the world."
A.S. Byatt quoted in Wachtel, 77
In the company of a sleeping cat and a dozing dog, I am staring out the window into a grey February, watching a scatter of snowflakes between me and three pine trees. I am thinking about Alice Munro. I hear her voice saying, "I spend a great deal of time staring out the window..." That memory comforts me, validates this long looking-out the window. I have also been reading Milan Kundera's Testaments Betrayed. I wish not to betray Munro's testaments as I read her statements about writing-and consider her stories in the light of those statements. In this quiet moment, somewhat unusual in my life, I begin with Munro's "Introduction" to her Selected Stories (1997).
What is story-and how is it to be told? These are questions which delight critics, of course, and they are questions which Munro entertains in interviews, essays, and the stories themselves. All sorts of fictions, fictives, narrators, narratees, points of view, personae. Munro's "Introduction" does not disappoint me. I find Alice Munro thinking back to staring out a library window into "Snow falling straight down" (Selected Stories, xii). She is watching a farmer, with horses, with grain piled on a sleigh, having the grain weighed. He looks like a picture, she says, "The snow conferring dignity and peace." But.
I didn't see itframed and removed in that way. I saw it alive andpotent, and it gave me something like a blow to the chest. What does it mean, what can be discovered about it, what is the rest of the story? The man and the horses are not symbolic or picturesque, they are moving through a story which is hidden, and now, for a moment, carelessly revealed. How can you get yourfinger on it, feel that life beating? It was more a torment than a comfort to thinkabout this, becauseicouldn't get hold of it at alL I went back to stringing out my secret and gradually less satisfying novel (Munro, Selected Stories, xii)
Munro's "secret novel" was based on the models which she knew at the time, particularly, she says, Wuthering Heights. While she stared out that window at the farmer, something happened to dislocate that idea of fiction, of how stories are to be told. These statements by Munro-and that image of her staring out into the snow resonate deeply for me. I too am staring out into snow falling-dancing-onto southwestem Ontario. And I too feel 16 something like a blow to the chest" when I consider, in relation to Munro's stories, such questions as "What does it mean, what can be discovered about it, what is the rest of the story?" The snow falling outside my window is not falling peacefully, straight down. It is floating, a flake at a time, it seems, exploring the air, before it decides to settle onto some surface. It is restless as I am restless, beginning this project. Or simply not in a hurry? Wanting the space to move in odd ways, to explore.
I did not "choose" to write short stories. I hoped to write novels. When you are responsible for running a house and taking care of small children, particularly in the days before disposable diapers or ubiquitous automatic washing machines,it's hard to arrange for large chunks of time. (Munro, Selected Stories, x)
Yes. I know. I get up to let the cat out. To prepare a slow-cooking supper. So that no one will notice that I have been otherwhere all afternoon. As I peel and scrape and set the table, I keep mulling over the stories of Friend of My Youth. I have carried those stories in mind for some time. Now I hope to re-enter them, slowly, carefully, tracing the ways they "constantly interweave themselves with other books and the world," informing and being informed.
In the Introduction to her Selected Stories, Munro goes on to say that "In later years my stories haven't been so short. They've grown longer, and in a waymore disjointedand demanding andpeculiar" (x). Herstory-telling gives me story. It also gives me reading/writing: "in a way more disjointed and demanding and peculiar," "about what interests me in a way that interests me, that gives me pleasure" (x). Munro is teaching me how to read Munro, but flashes of insight from other places confirm and extend the lessons.
By his refusal of systems, Nietzsche brought deep changes to the way philosophy is done.- as Hannah Arendt defined it, Nietzsche's thought is experimental thought. His first impulse is to break up whatever is rigid, to undermine commonly accepted systems, to open riftsfor venturing into the unknown ... (Milan Kundera, 174)
Munro, looking at the farmer and the horses in the falling snow does not accept a "system" to fit him into, not even the system which would catch and hold him, suspended, in a painting: the nineteenth century Romantic picture of "Farmer and Horses in Falling Snow." Even as a young woman, looking out a library window, a framing, in her home town, she yearns toward breaking up what she knows would be rigid, commonly accepted. She wants to wander into rifts, to find what might be in there. She also wants to find a way to open up rifts, spaces, where she suspects story really lingers. She is growing dissatisfied with romance, even dark romance, with Wuthering Heights.
[Rabelais and other early novelists] talk about what fascinates them and they stop when the fascination stops. Their freedom of composition set me dreaming.- of writing without fabricating suspense, without constructing a plot and working up its plausibility, of writing without describing a period, a milieu, a city,- of abandoning all that and holding on to only the essential; that is to say: creating a work in which the bridges and the filler have no reason to be and in which the novelist would never beforced-for the sake ofform and its dictates-to stray by even a single line from what he cares about, what fascinates him. (Milan Kundera, 159)
Kundera goes on to realize that if "everything becomes theme, the background disappears and, as in a cubist painting, there is nothing but foreground" (165). Each situation investigated is then "pierced by a long gaze that considers what it means, how to understand it and think it through" (166). Munro, though, does not stare in order to think it through. She lingers, moves into, in order to find a way to experience and then to recreate. Thinking matters-and obviously happens-but is only a part of the process.
These statements from Kundera help me to see something else. Postmodern that she is, Munro deeply appreciates tradition. Part of her uneasiness with Wuthering Heights, I begin to suspect, may have something to do with moving back beyond it as well as forward from it. Munro very deliberately places a quotation from Tristram Shandy at the end of her "Introduction" to the Selected Stories:
But mark, madam, we live amongst the riddles and mysteries-the most obvious things, which come our way, have dark sides, which the quickest sight cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings among us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost every cranny ofnature's works: so that this, like a thousand other things, falls outfor us in a way, which tho' we cannot reason upon it-yet we find the good ofit, may it please your reverence and your worships-and that's enough for us. (Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, quoted in Munro, Selected Stories, xvii)
So ... even if we cannot reason upon the dark sides and the crannies, we can find the good of them. That good "falls out for us." By reading it and living with it. By being careful not to betray it with a false testament and not reducing it to a "system." About now it seems time to go walk in the icy sun which has broken through the clouds. The snow has stopped trying to fall.
Anyone venturing into rifts, trying to live or move around in them, as Munro does, and as she invites her reader to do, has to have keen senses. In this apparent peace and plenty of southwestem Ontario, there do not seem to be many rifts. However. A quiet woman sitting next to me in a church basement in Lucknow, at a civilized community supper, flew into tight lipped anger when I slipped Munro's name into a conversation about telling stories. She does not like Munro's writing. "We are not as thick-headed as she writes about us," she says. And: "When she writes, she skips all over the place." This from a woman who had been talking about the untold and hidden stories of the farms along the concession roads. Stories she was keeping hidden in a drawer. Stories which were not to be spoken. Or written. Apparent peace and plenty.
Reverie. The word presents itself It is what Munro tells us when she describes her ways of working: that staring deep into the centre ofan image suddenly numinous, watching what shimmers in the peripheral vision, trying to catch hold of it, so that in time, the original image may fade, as others take its place. Gaston Bachelard speaks of a consciousness always alert, aware, during reverie, watching what happens, leaning toward the blank page. This observing, thinking presence, for Bachelard, distinguishes between the dream (asleep) and the reverie (awake): unlike the dreamer, who watches, at the mercy of whatever is presented, the cogito participates in and shapes the reverie.
Aren't two types of reverie possible according to whether one lets himself flow into the succession of happy images or whether he lives at the center of an image while feeling it radiate? A cogito is assured in the soul of the dreamer who lives at the center of a radiating image. (Gaston Bachelard, 153)
The cogito-the thinking-of the reverie notices. Lingers over, puzzles over how to convey the astonishment, the charin, the challenge of receiving a radiating image. Munro often tells us that she works slowly, that she spends a long time with one of those images, watching what gathers in. For her, it seems, those images are likely to be quite concrete-something noticed, heard, smelled-something experienced sensually and then observed, waited with.. Puzzling over what strengths will be necessary to take possession of the story, to "tell" it, watching to see what will accumulate around that first image. Living patiently, expectantly, at the center of an accumulating story, moving all the while toward the blank page.
"I am a dreamer of words," Bachelard says (17)-and so am I. He maintains that to appreciate the writing which comes out of reverie, "it is necessary to read it in slow reading" (161), a phrase which delights me.
To read English at university now is to get very excited about theories of language, but not to go through that primary process of reading patiently and listening to the thought of somebody who has written down what they have written. (A.S.Byatt in Wachtel, 85)
Bachelard also decides that "Reverie lives from its primary interest" (153), and Munro, like Kundera's Rabelais, insists on the interesting:
wachtel Do you know what makes you happy? Are you happy? munro Yes. It's as I said, it's being interested. This is the thing I hope will never leave me-a very high level of interest most of the time. When that vanishes, which it sometimes does temporarily, I think it would be awful to live like this, going through the motions of life. But we all experience times like that. It's also very important to me to love certain human beings and be loved by them-then what happens in their lives is very important. But underneath, the thing that would help me survive anything, I think, is this interestedness. (in Wachtel, 111)
Munro has been telling us about reading and writing for a long time. I began to learn how to read her work as Del, in The Epilogue to Lives of girls and Women inused about writing, about the impossibility of catching what she wanted in lists, because she wanted everything-all the layers-"held still and held together-radiant, everlasting" (210). Twenty-two years after the publication of Lives of Girls and Women, Munro says to Wachtel: "So I thought, this is a really interesting layeredness of feeling and I want to write about it" (Wachtel, 108). Layers of speech, thought, dream and sense impression-held still, as in reverie-held together, as in writing. I also learned from that Epilogue, and indeed from the whole book, that Munro was not interested in the kind of realism which preoccupied Uncle Craig. She leaned a long way, as did Del, toward Uncle Bennie's way of story telling:, exaggerated, distorted, made grotesque, bizarre, as a way of seeing into truth, a truth which the facts could never get at. "The main thing was that it seemed true to me, not real but true, as if I had discovered, not made up, such people and such a story, as if that town was lying close behind the one I walked through every day" (Munro, Lives, 206).
The forms taken from the real need to be inflated with oneiric matter. The writer shows us the cooperation of the psychic reality function with the function of the unreal. (Gaston Bachelard, 160)
While I sort laundry, words sift through my mind and my hands, along with the towels. Words I am accumulating from Munro, Kundera, Byatt, Bachelard: reverie, interesting, foreground, reality and unreality, bizarre, slow, writing, reading, window, multiplicity, cogito, radiating image, rift ... How did Byatt get in here? I turned to Bachelard because I was thinking about reverie. But Byatt? I was leafing through Eleanor Wachtel's interviews and stopped to read the one with Byatt. I enjoy the way her mind works. She has strong opinions, but she understands multiplicity.
Philosophers ofthe strong ontology who overtake being in its totality and keep it integrally even in describing the most fleeting modes will quickly denounce this dispersed ontology which attaches itset(to details, perhaps to accidents and which believes it is multiplying its proofs by multiplying its points of view. (Gaston Bachelard, 166)
Certainly details. Often accidents. Of the way in which one book connects to another. Definitely multiplied points of view. Frequently dispersed. Noticing.
-sort laundry -scrub bathroom floor -decide on numbers of posters -walk dog
Lists, as Munro says, cannot possibly hold it all-but they do have a way oftuming into something else. Item: walk dog. Becomes a long walk on the golf course. Mostly in the rough places which no one has managed to make smooth. Yet. The dog likes these places and so do I. Easy walking in the light snow cover. Cold wind, though, roaring in the tops of the trees. A hawk rises, circles, settles back down into a tall tree. Long walking, for a long time. One foot in front of another: no fixed destination: a satisfying way of being in the world. Ontology afoot. Dispersed.The details which accumulate in non-manicured landscape.
"Friend of My Youth"
In the collection, Friend of my Youth, the first story in the volume is this title story. In conversation with Eleanor Wachtel, Munro talks about this story.
munro I knew I was struggling with the subject matter of my mother. I hadn't thought I'd tackle that part of my life ever again. In fact, when I wrote that story I really thought I had moved on, from autobiographical or personal stories. What interested me in the story was this idea that, after a while, we don't want the stories changed, even in a better way. The dream business... I did have dreams like this for years. The mother appears in the dream and things aren't so bad. Well okay, be happy about it. But you've constructed your whole personality, and your feelings have their roots in something different and you can't quite give that up. So I thought, this is a really interesting layeredness of feeling and I want to write about it. That ties in with how I would have seen the story of Flora, at first in that very classic way-the teenage girl imagines the story as she would write the novel, the classic tragedy. Then it's all turned around... (in Wachtel, 108)
"In that very classic way"-the way of Wuthering Heights. But then there are the dark places to look into, where "your feelings have their roots in something different and you can't quite give that up." And other possibilities explode neatness, stir things up, so that a different world/story happens.
Oddly -my mother too taught school in a one-room schoolhouse in the Ottawa Valley: "It was not a valley at all, ifby that you mean a cleft between hills; it was a mixture of flat fields and low rocks and heavy bush and little lakes-a scrambled, disarranged sort of country with no easy harmony about it, not yielding readily to any description" (5). Which, of course, is exactly why I love it. I dreamed about my mother last night. I saw that it would be good to travel with her. Then I was reminded that it was too late. She died a year ago. Travel as metaphor? No, I don't think so. I think it was actually travel. As in moving around the world, which my mother never liked to do. Puzzling. Echoes from "Friend of My Youth," I guess-and from Munro talking with Wachtel about her mother.
This story feels remarkably akin to Lives of Girls and Women-the adolescent narrator sifting story styles and ways of being a woman. This complex narrator, adolescent, adult, resents a dream about her mother. In it, she has no control. I believe that the narrator works her way from being the object of the dream, to being the subject of the reverie. (Will I be able to do that with my dream? Which, I am quite sure, grew out of this story.)
Each "section" of the story presents a way of telling the story of Flora and Ellie and Robert. First, there is the gossips' telling: in hushed tones and puzzlement: pieces not understood. Then the mother's way-which tries to make Flora romantic and heroic-noble. Then the rebelling adolescent's way, which makes Flora evil and scheming, rejecting the romantic view of the world-ironically, accepting the Wuthering Heights atmosphere of hovering evil and darkness-even as she resists the idea of the classic novel. But the story pieces make their way through the various notions of story-telling. They resist easy shaping, they do not yield "readily to any description (Wachtel, 5).
Neighbours thought of Flora as the loser to Ellie, her sister, in the love triangle: the object. In a living nightmare. The narrator's mother makes her the heroine, the subject of her own story-but the object of the mother's wish to create character, to write a novel. Flora herself, through her behaviour, always appears in control. She is not, in her own mind, the object of anything: she stands proud.
Watching all the pieces of the story, with no easy harmony about them, not yielding readily to any description, I sort them in my own story-telling way, under the influence, likely, of social work essays I sometimes mark-and of the late night newscast. I know that Munro does not carelessly repeat words. The word "secret" shows up several times in this story. What is the secret at the heart of this black house? The secret which Flora chooses to keep black, as she keeps her half of the house black.
The other word which leaps off the page at me is "sister-in-law." After Ellie's death, her nurse marries Robert, and she refers to Flora as "my sister-in-law." "She invited them to laugh at flora, whom she always called her sister-in-law, though she had no right to do so" (18). Maybe she did. After all, why was Robert's claim to the farm so easy? Why were Ellie's pregnancies such abominations? Why were there thistles in the bed? Why does the Scots accent come so easily to Flora when she reads aloud? A dark story of mystery, of a family's shame. Incest.
And it runs parallel to the narrator's own family shame about turning her back on her mother, especially "when I was all she had to turn to." Ellie has a "growth." The narrator has "a bitter lump of love" which the dream figure of her mother transforms: "She changes the bitter lump of love I have carried all this time into a phantom-something useless and uncalled for, like a phantom pregnancy" (26).
Psalm 74:20: "The dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty." This house is a black house. And Flora chooses to keep her half of it black.
Psalm 78: 56: "Yet they tempted and provoked the most high God and kept not his testimonies."
Passages in the story from the psalms which the Cameronians sang as they went into battle.
This story does, indeed, look into the dark places. But there are triumphs. Flora leaves the farm, takes up a life in town. The narrator moves from being without self in the dream which is a disquieting dislocation for her, to being the subject of this reverie, which she shapes in her own way, winding versions of Flora's story in and out around themselves and around the figure of her mother. And, in the nature of reverie, this story does not stop here. It does not get "shut up in the book and put away" (Munro in Wachtel, 108). Its mysteries pulse into other reveries, other imaginings, other story-tellings, other dreams. Like mine.
"Five Points"
Two linked stories begin at the same point-hardly noticed-"in the trailer park on the cliffs above Lake Huron." They split apart, with one happening a long way away, in Victoria. Two stories about illicit, slightly desperate sex-and about how hard it is to tell a true story. One lies under the other, in a space like the salt mines under Lake Huron, "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" (47).
The two stories run parallel to one another, until the darker one of a young girl using money from her parents' store to pay for sex begins to bubble up into the other one, the story of Brenda and Neil, meeting in the trailer park near Lake Huron. One story touches the other, bounces off it, informs it. Why do I see Brenda's yellow shoes as the taking off point for this whole story? Probably because they are often mentioned, and because they seem so like the moneybeing paid out in Victoria: "'In shoes like that?' says Neil. They both look at her yellow shoes, which match the appliqued-satin birds on her turquoise sweater. Both things bought and worn for him" (44)! And they become the center of the fight which gathers between them-as the two stories come together:
"Also, I did take some money," Neil says. "I got forty dollars, which compared to what some guys got, was east nothing. I swear that's all, forty dollars. I never got any more." She doesn't say anything. "I wasn't looking to confess it," he says. "I iust wanted to talk about it. Then what pisses me off is I lied anyway." (48)
How to tell a story? And who to tell it to? And what happens when it is not the absolute end, as it feels like, but "only the start of a new stage, a continuation" (49). More story.
It is easy to miss passages like the following in a Munro story, but when I read slowly, they lift off the page into significance. I carry them around with me, savoring them. Perhaps in these adultery stories of high drama, they are the quiet places where I pause: "There are some tricky spots to drive-a couple of bumpy little hills rising out of the swamp, and a narrow log bridge over a creek where she can't see any water, just choking, yellowy cress and nettles, sucking at dry mud" (35). Interesting that her shoes are yellow and her life has a dry aridity. These lyrical passages in Munro's writing may seem like idle description, but they always linktightly to the themes of the stories and to the characters.
The dreams that interest me both in my own work and as Iread, are where by looking away from what you're thinking about, you can actually experience it much more intensely in images, or in vividspectra. (A.S.Byatt in Byatt and Sodre, 235)
"Meneseteung"
This is one of my very favourite Munro stories. But that is not a reliable statement. As I read each one, I think that it is my favourite. Nevertheless, there is something special about this one. The pathos-and injustice-of the life of a "poetess" in a late nineteenth century small town in Ontario make me sad or angry or dispirited-according to the day and how many floors I have had to scrub, I guess.
Two stories: Almeda Roth's and Jarvis Poulter's, but mostly Almeda's. A collage of poems, clippings from the Vidette, narrative which moves from speculation to authoritative telling of the story-and then undercuts itself"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" (73). That grape jelly. Linked to an overflowing of poetic images for Almeda-and to the beginning of her "flow," easing the cramping in her belly.
Reality and unreality. Reality-in the shaping of the story-infused with imagining, with detail, with speculation. Almeda struggling with reality and unreality: "No need for alarm. For she hasn't thought that crocheted roses could float away or that tombstones could hurry down the street. She doesn't mistake that for reality, and neither does she mistake anything else for reality, and that is how she knows that she is sane" (71). As I read, I have little idea what is "reality" and what is not. The streets? the newspapers? the town? the Roths? Jarvis Poulter? Were they historical figures? Are these really quotes from an actual newspaper? Who wrote these poems? Perhaps I will be all right if I do not mistake anything for reality. So all ofthis is fiction: arranged, gathered, imagined. Delightful. And sad:
Of course, Almeda in her observations cannot escape words. She may think she can, but she can't. Soon this glowing and swelling begins to suggest words-not specific words but a flow of words somewhere, just about ready to make themselves known to her. Poems, even. Yes, again, poems. Or one poem. Isn't that the idea-one very great poem that will contain everything and, oh, that will 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 halfofit. You have to get in the obscure racket on Pearl Street and the polished toe of Jarvis Poulter's boot and the pluckedchicken haunch with its blue-black flower. Almeda is a long way now from human sympathies or fears or cozy household considerations. (71)
And when she dies, her name is not even mentioned in the town paper-only the fact that she is "a familiar eccentric, or even, sadly, a figure of fun." But Jarvis Poulter, when he dies, is Mr. Jarvis Poulter, "bringing the benefits of industry, productivity, and employment to our town" (72).
... there are places where you must leave a space. (A.S.Byatt in Byatt & Sodre, 240)
This story is full of spaces-in which to linger. I come away with the sense of having read a novel@r even several books. I remember Del: "It was all I could do to read the words on a billboard, when we were driving" (Munro, Lives, 184). I have been reading Almeda's ambivalence about the idea of going driving ( in a buggy) with Jarvis Poulter: "And sorry to have the countryside removed for her-filmed over, in a way, by his talk and preoccupations" (61).
Men-except for her father-seem to her deprived in some way, incurious. No doubt that is necessary, so that tfiey will do what they have to do. Would she herself, knowing that there was salt in the earth, discover how to get it out and sell it? Not likely. She would be thinking about the ancient sea. That kind of speculation is what Jarvis Poulter has, quite properly, no time for. (61)
Ah, curiosity. "People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together" (73). And of course, I am curious. What is it that I am to put together? I wonder how far it is to Clinton-or to Wingham-to that graveyard. Which town has Dufferin and Pearl streets? I will have to find out. And who wrote those poems? Did Almeda Roth make grape jelly? Who would know?
munro I want the stories to keep going on. I want the story to exist somewhere so that, in a way, it's still happening, or happening over and over again. I don't want it to be shut up in the book and put away. (in Wachtel, 108)
If I drop into about the middle of "Meneseteung," this is what I find-an actual room in a house, as it happens, but it might not have been:
Her surroundings-some of her surroundings-in the dining room are these: walls covered with dark-green garlanded wallpaper, lace curtains and mulberry velvet curtains on the windows, a table with a crocheted cloth and a bowl of wax fruit, a pinkish-gray carpet with nosegays of blue and pink roses, a sideboard spread with embroidered runners and holding various patterned plates and jugs and the silver tea things. A lot of things to watch. For every one of these patterns, decorations seems charged with life, ready to move and flow and alter. Or possibly to explode. Almeda Roth's preoccupation throughout the day is to keep an eye on them. Not to prevent their alteration so much as to catch them at it-to understand it, to be a part of it. So much is going on in this room that there is no need to leave it. There is not even the thought of leaving it. (69)
Layers of reverie: Munro's, the narrator's, Almeda's, mine, my reader's ... In the way of reverie, focus closes in on the textures of that room-while ghosts and associations gather into peripheral vision: expectations for women, reality/unreality, the writer's agony, isolation, observation, texture: all the swirling associations. That crocheted tablecloth! Almeda:
too clumsy for crochetwork, and embroidery which one sees often d flower baskets, the little Dutch th their watering cans-have likewise proved to be beyond my skill. So I offer instead, as the product of my leisure hours, these rude posies, these ballads couplets, reflections." (52)
That crocheted tablecloth. It becomes my aunt trying to teach me how to make crocheted lace, becomes crocheted place mats which I worked over yesterday, bleaching them, washing them, ironing them. Table mats crocheted by a grandmother-in-law, now dead. Who knew a great deal about crocheting, whose work must be respected. Who was, in her generation, a proper woman and housewife.
... thephantoms which takeform in the writer's reverie are our intercessors to teach us to sojourn in the double life, at the sensitized frontier between the real and the imaginary. (Gaston Bachelard, 162)
Background: painting discovered it during the Renaissance, along with perspective, which divided the picture between what is upfront and what is in the rear. This produced painting's particular formal problem: the portrait, for example: theface commands more attention and interest than the body does, andstill more than the drapery behind. This is quite normal, this [is] how we see the world around us, but nonetheless, what is normal in life does not correspond to the formal requirements of art: the imbalance, in apainting, between the privileged areas and those that are, apriori, secondary still had to be compensated for, remedied, brought back into balance. Or else radically set aside, through a new aesthetic that would cancel out that dichotomy. (Milan Kundera, 157)
Reading Munro, one forgets that the dichotomy ever existed. No privileged and/or secondary areas in these stories. Dichotomies have been replaced by "layeredness of feeling-" and ofparticipation, ofentry points. Through sensitized frontiers.
"Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass"
Phantoms hover in this story at the meeting points between the real and the imaginary, between memory and story, wishful thinking and reality, secrets and truth, history and the present, ambiguity and clarity, joy and pain-as Hazel visits a small community in Scotland, where her husband Jack stayed during the war, where he had an affair, where he visited with a cousin. Nobody is telling her anything. Gradually, she begins to fit pieces together.,But she misses altogether an unasked/unanswered question: Is Judy Armstrong, an "orphan," who now lives with the cousin, Jack's daughter?
This story is once again collage: war stories told in the Legion, private stories told at home, diary writing, an old ballad, the wanderings of a (perhaps) senile woman, confession... Many entry points. Hazel sees some of them. Misses others. Antoinette was the hotel keeper's daughter when Jack was there. Now she owns the hotel. She is having an affair with Dudley Brown, but she vomits by the side ofthe river: "Where in that poem, the girl goes out and loses her maidenhead, and so on" (98). Dudley says she is wrong, that is not the place where the ballad was set. And the reader gathers pieces, fits them together: "Antoinette used to run out to meet Jack with nothing but her nightie on under her coat. Her Daddy would have tanned her, Jack used to say. Tanned us both (89). And Dudley Brown, recites the ballad
"They shaped him in her arms at last, A mother-naked man; She wrapt him in her green mantle, And so her true love wan!" (101)
Dudley Brown is in love with Antoinefte-who was Jack's lover-and with Judy Arinstrong-who is the mother of Dudley's child-and who is very likely Antoinette and Jack's child. Who could possibly sort it all out? This layeredness of connections, of feelings? No wonder they do not tell Hazel anything. She thinks: "This reciting was like singing. You couldparade your longing without fear of making a fool of yourself' (101).
When a reader stares into the images of these stories, they shift and change, as Almeda Roth knew, but they also become transparent, spaces to see into-through-to somewhere else beyond them-while all sorts of phantoms shift and play around the edges of peripheral vision. Phantoms from times past and from times present. Gothic, in the rooms of these houses which are Munro stories.
Ballad: an almost heart-breaking poignancy. Phantoms loom up out of a heroic past-and then fade away. Heroic stories traced to their roots turn out to be less-and more-than the legends which they have become. Much is risked-and often, lost-for love. Events are larger than life, storied. This story is about this process-and the people caught in it. At the same time, it is this process. Once again, I become aware of the poetics of Munro's way of writing. No dichotomy opens here between the story told and its ways of working. Neither is privileged. They are wound into one another. And haunting.
"Oranges and Apples"
wachtel I want to try out a theory on you. One of the ways you exhibit your craft as a writer is that you give us in these stories a profound sense of absence. There are absences everywhere: deaths, vanished worlds, missing spouses, broken marriages, one character even has a missing eye. What do you think?
munro I can't deal with theories very well. But yes, absences certainly interest me. Loss, which everyone experiences all the time. We keep losing ourselves and the worlds we used to live in. (in Wachtel, 109)
This is certainly a story about loss: the loss of a way of life, of a town, of a family business, of home. Murray and his wife Barbara are apples and oranges: they do not match-or even agree-on anything much. The underlying, unforgettable, pervasive, irony is that Murray, who has lost almost everything there is to lose, would be very glad to lose Barbara-and never does. Not even to illness: "'Don't disappoint me again"' (135). Murray's thought as he waits for Barbara to tell him the result of medical tests for malignancy in a tumour is chilling. No wonder she finds that he is shivering. And she deduces that he was terribly worried about her. What a creep. He, of course, does not have the gumption to just leave.
"Pictures of the Ice"
A story is not like a road to follow, I said, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay therefor a while, wandering back and forth and settling whereyou like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, notjust to shelter or beguile you. (Munro, Selected Stories, xvii)
The "house" in this story is built out of blocks and caves of ice, lake water thrown up onto the shore and frozen into wondrous shapes and places. They are indeed not there to shelter or beguile anyone, but are there oftheir own necessity. They remind me of "People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable-deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum" (Munro, Lives, 2 1 0).
The caves of Austin Cobbett's life seem bright and open, but they are full of dark rifts and crannies-where illness, death, deceit are lurking. "Anyway, he's very difficult to talk to. He makes all the right noises, he seems so open, but in reality he's very closed" (147). It's probably the only way the poor man gets anypeace at all. He does not wish to live out his dying in front of everyone, with all the attendant commentary and fussing. Surely a man can choose his own way and place of dying-and if he wishes to create some romantic, slightly titillating fantasy around it, why not? At the same time, Karin-who seems so open and trustworthy-is taking things out of his house into her own (pretty bleak) apartment-and comes to realize that she is doing it with his blessing.
This time reading the story, I lingered over aparticular sentence ofaustin's: "'Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we-have children"' (146), Presumably, he started to say "What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive..." but he caught himself and changed it-quite cleverly, for a man who has not had a lot of practice in deception. But who has spent a lot of time in those caves and hollows of ice.
"Goodness and Mercy"
The goodness of a dutiful daughter. The mercy of story-telling. This is a mother-daughter story, too. But in this one, the daughter constantly attends to her sick mother. They are on an ocean voyage, crossing from Canada to Europe on a Norwegian freighter which carries passengers. Averill has sewn beautiful caftans for Bugs, to try to hide her illness and wasted body. One, in particular, is made up of lovely fragments of fabric from clothes and curtains and a tablecloth-all bought at second hand stores. Apparently they do not hide her well, because everyone on the ship knows how ill Bugs really is.
At first, this seems like a "ship of fools 11 story, with Bugs capturing the idiosyncrasies of fellow passengers in cryptic remarks and clever nicknames. But it becomes something altogether other. Averill sits late into the nights outside her mother's cabin window, where she can hear her breathing and know if she needs anything. The captain, on his nightly rounds, sees her there but does not acknowledge her presence.
I linger a while over what Bugs has to say about professors: "'Also, professors are dumb. They are dumber than ordinary. I could be nice and say they know about things we don't, but as far as I'm concerned they don't know shit... (158). Sigh. Probably it's true. It is true that as far as Bugs is concerned, I don't know much. I am not sure that she is Averill's mother. I am not sure what her illness is. I am not sure that Averill is not poisoning her. I am not at all sure who is telling this story. I am beginning not to be sure who is reading it!
-Averill sits under her mother's cabin window at night -she watches the captain take his nightly walks along the rail -she thinks that the captain knows the stories of everyone on board -she is making up a story in her head every night -she often tells herself stories -she sings the 231 psalm to herself -her singing is a barrier between the world in her head and the world outside -the captain tells a story -the captain grants her a fragment of the story he is telling: Psalm 23 -Averill tells herself that it is her story: her perfectly secret story -the one she has been making up in her head -Averill continues the captain's story in her head: it has several versions -Averill believed it was her story he had told, with some details changed -he had delivered the story back to her -she had made it, he had taken it, and told it, safely -the story loops back to end at the end of the captain's story -Averill is absolved, fortunate -goodness and mercy
Now I know some things which I did not know before making this list. Backing into a list can bring a kind of clarity: complexity caught and held for a moment, so as to see it. It becomes a kind of sketch, bare but with the possibility of being filled in, embroidered. And I see that this is a beautiful piece. Story occupies the fringes between reality and non-reality. Who makes a story? Who tells it? How? Sea captains, maybe. Professors not. For dutiftil daughters, do stories remain secret? Or not? Absolution is the telling of the story.
"Oh, What Avails"
Joan and Morris, sister and brother-with-one-eye-lost, are growing up in a gaunt house, with a dining room where "On the inside of the windows, all the wooden shutters are closed" (180). There is safety in this house, though, this place where they are leaming to be "particular," a dangerous thing to be in southwestem Ontario. The house is made special by their mother's verbal cleverness, bits of poems, and nicknames for the people in the town. She defends herself and her family in the same way Bugs did in the previous story. Language as shield.
Not surprisingly, I am caught by an image of Joan looking through the coloured glass beside the front door:
Joan gets up from the piano bench and goes quietly across the dining room, through the door into the hall, right up to the front door. She puts her face against the colored glass, You can't see through this glass, because the hall is dark, but if you get your eye in the right place you can see out. There is more red than any other color, so she chooses a red view-though she has managed every color in her time-blue and gold and green; even if there's just a tiny leaf of it, she has figured a way to squint through. (192-3)
As she squints through the glass, watching her brother who is about to be insulted, Joan has an uneasy feeling that this house is perhaps not a protection-that "It is just a place to be judged like other places-it's nothing special" (193). It occurs to Joan that her mother may be mistaken about her power to affect things.
Joan squinting through the glass links, for me, to The Photographer, in the Epilogue to Lives of girls and Women. He was a part of the novel De] was making up in her mind-his photographs distorted people, showed up the things they were trying to hide. He was not a popular photographer. He 14 misrepresented" things and people, through the eye ofhis camera. As Joan does through the coloured glass. As do all these stories.
When the town has changed, become modem, Joan thinks regretfully that there was room for eccentricity in the old town but not in the new one. Joan watches to see how people keep "rubble" at bay: "Acting is an excellent way ... Though there are gaps in acting" (208). She turns back to her brother: "In Morris's sort of life or way of looking at things, there seems to be less chance of gaps" (208). Morris has made himself particular through managing money. His life looks orderly-and appropriate. But he has a secret and not-acknowledged love. Gaps in his life too. These two lives, brother's and sister's, come together around a poem remembered from childhood, "Ah, what avails the sceptered race," which shows them, if they can see it, that Matilda, eccentric, on the fringes of their world, always had "every virtue, every grace" (215).
Interesting, that. To think that particularity does not do it. The secret to holding the rubble at bay is eccentricity. Maybe then a person simply does not see the gaps and rifts -or is not at their mercy, having lived in them most of the time.
"Differently"
In this complicated story ofinter-locking adulteries and shifting friendships, Georgia takes comfort from her bookstore and from "accidental clarity:"
Georgia took the store seriously. She had a serious, secret liking for it that she could not explain. It was a long, narrow store with an old fashioned funneled entryway between two angled display windows ... Here the books could come into their own, as they never could in a more artful and enticing suburban bookshop. (230).
And here Georgia could come into her own:
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. (231)
Through all this complicated story of adultery and rifts between people, this is the passage I remember, cling to. Interestingly, so does Georgia, many years later:
She doesn't think about Raymond or Miles, or Maya, or even Ben. She thinks about sitting in the store in the evenings. The light in the street, the complicated reflections in the windows. The accidental clarity. (243)
To read as ifyour life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl ofyour dreamlike, the physical sensations ofyour ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce the routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what ofthe right answers, the so-called multiple choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only? (Adrienne Rich, 32-3)
"Wigtime"
I think this story has something to do with how to manage men. In the ways women are supposed to know. Where/how do you learn those things? My life is full of men: brothers, husband, father, father-in-law, sons, their friends, my students, my colleagues, my neighbours ... And I don't have a clue about how to manage any of them. Mostly, I guess, I just go around them when they get in the way. I have always found them honorable. I long ago learned how to recognize the ones who aren't. I avoid them. I like the ones like the Scots captain: "He was a man made long ago, not making himself moment by moment and using whomever he could find in the process" (167). Maybe that's the key. Reuel, in this story, is not honorable, is still making himselfup, moment by moment. He had "glittery layers ready to flake away" (167), so he left himself open to manipulation.
I enjoy this story of the lives of two girls, Anita and Margot, growing up together-and the ways in which their lives cross-over and around Theresa's, a war bride, a strange and displaced person. The ways they try to effect their lives-to bring about what they want to have happen-differ greatly: "There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come" (Munro, Lives, 146). Addie was right. And women have found multiple ways to bring about the changes they want.
"Wigtime" becomes a ftinny, coded word: half-joke, half-waming: I know a story I could tell if I choose to, so you had better do as I say. Taking control, through language, through story.
Once again, the eccentric, the marginal person triumphs in the end. Theresa is in a psychiatric ward a good part of the time, and she lives in her fantasy world: "'We're all on the boat,' says Margot. 'She thinks we're all on the boat. But she's the one Reuel's going to meet in Halifax, lucky her"' (273).
Visiting: de-constructing, re-constructing their lives, "Margot and Anita have got this far. They are not ready yet to stop talking. They are fairly happy" (273).
Staring out the library window at a farmer and his horses, deep at the centre of a radiating image, puzzling over images-becoming-stories, watching layers accumulate, carrying insights from reverie onto the blank page, and having them explode-or shift-to something/somewhere else. Unable to escape words. I find Munro tussling with this process in conversation, in essays, in story. An observing presence shapes daydreams so that they become reverie: Munro's, the narrator's, a character's, the reader's. Openings into these reveries are odd and multiple: the lens of a camera, a squint through a fragment of coloured glass, a staring out to sea in the darkness, a steady looking out a window. Eccentric, outside the centre: subtle, shifting, looking into-or out from-rifts and crannies. Often taking up residence in those riddles and dark places. Prevailing. Fine edges of image and insight blur, leaving unanswered questions, creating phantoms that hover on the margins ofreality and unreality-so that the stories do not end, do not "remain shut up in the book, but go on happening."
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. Translated from the French by Daniel Russell. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
Byatt, A. S. and Ignes Sodre. Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers. Edited by Rebecca Swift. London: Random House, 1995.
Kundera, Milan. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts Translated from the French by Linda Asher. Originally published in France as Les testaments trahis, 1993. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996.
Munro, Alice. Friend of my Youth. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990.
__. Lives of Girls and Women. Toronto: Penguin, 1990. First published by McGraw-Hill-Ryerson, 1971.
__."Introduction," Selected Stories. Toronto: Penguin, 1998. First published by McClelland & Stewart, 1996.
Rich, Adrienne. What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. New York: Norton, 1994.
Wachtel, Eleanor. Writers & Company. Toronto: Knopf, 1993.
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