Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Wednesday
I’m reposting this essay, written ten years ago, on the occasion of the Nobel Prize-winning Canadian author Alice Munro, who died yesterday. Novelists generally get all the glory, certainly from the Nobel committee, with short story specialists regarded as poor cousins. But Munro, whom I compare to Chekhov, was an exception. Her stories are so sensitive, nuanced, and well-crafted that she built a fan base of discriminating readers.
Reprinted from August 22, 2014
My book discussion group met last night to discuss Alice Munro’s Dear Life, and for the first time I took a close look at our most recent Nobel laureate. Like the other members of the group, I saw my life in the author’s short stories.
Having recently spent time reading book after book to my grandson, I was immediately captivated by her description of reading to children:
The problem was that once she finished Christopher Robin, Katy wanted it started again, immediately. During the first reading she had been quiet, but now she began chiming in with ends of lines. Next time she chanted word for word though still not ready to try it by herself. Greta could imagine this being an annoyance to people once the dome car filled up. Children Katy’s age had no problem with monotony. In fact they embraced it, diving into it and wrapping the familiar words round their tongues as if they were a candy that could last forever.
As my reading group discussed the book, we came to see that this relationship with monotony isn’t confined to children. Or rather, there seem to be two contradictory tendencies at work in Munro’s fiction: monotony provides a reassuring security and monotony threatens to suffocate. Some characters thrash around in this dull monotony and even try to sabotage lives that appear prosperous and stable. Others have made their peace with monotony, ratcheting down what they demand of life.
One member of the group mentioned an essay by Margaret Atwood on national identities that we had discussed a while back. Atwood says that while America’s national story is about conquering the frontier, the Canadian national story involves simply surviving. We see the survival motif working itself out in the Canadian Munro. Sometimes people have lowered their expectations so as not to be hurt. In “Pride” a man with a hairlip is thrown off balance when a woman finds herself attracted to him and goes through some sad but comic twists to keep their cordial relationship from becoming intimate. In “Amundsen” a doctor suddenly and unexpected decides suddenly not to marry a woman as they are walking toward the courthouse. In “Train” a returning war veteran slips in and out of various people’s lives, his leaving seemingly timed to the rise of imminent intimacy.
Munro gives us insight into how she herself must have been taught to toe the line in “Night,” one of the autobiographical stories that conclude the collection. Note the contrast between the unimaginative father and the very imaginative child:
If you live long enough as a parent nowadays, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn’t bother to know about along with the ones you do know about all too well. You are somewhat humbled at heart, sometimes disgusted with yourself. I don’t think my father felt anything like this. I do know that if I had ever taxed him, with his use on me of the razor strap or his belt, he might have said something about like or lumping it. Those strappings, then, would have stayed in his mind, if they stayed at all, as no more than the necessary and adequate curbing of a mouthy child’s imagining that she could rule the roost.
“You thought you were too smart,” was what he might have given as his reason for the punishments, and indeed you heard that often in those times, with the smartness figuring as an obnoxious imp that had to have the same sass beaten out of him. Otherwise there was the risk of him growing up thinking he was smart. Or her, as the case might be.
The interesting twist in “Night” is that the child needs this father’s steadiness to recover from recurring insomnia accompanied by dark thoughts of murdering her sister. One night she meets her father sitting on the porch following one of her nocturnal ramblings and finds it immensely comforting that he expresses no alarm at her thoughts. By his simply taking them in stride’” – “Then he said not to worry. He said, ‘People have those kinds of thoughts sometimes.’” – she is able to start sleeping again.
Munro reminds me a lot of Chekhov. Women in her stories act out without ever being sure of what they want. Men are offered relief from loneliness but turn it down because their routine lives seem safer. Children carry around holes in their hearts from tragedies that have happened—the death of a sibling or of a beloved babysitter—and never face up to their grief. Acknowledging deep feelings would render them vulnerable and they fear they wouldn’t be able to survive.
Munro neither condemns nor applauds these responses but sympathetically describes them. She is like the woman in “Dolly” who temporarily goes off the rails and writes her longtime partner an unforgivable letter. Returning to him before he gets the letter, she is simultaneously relieved and exasperated by his readiness to tear it up without reading it once it arrives:
What a mix of rage and admiration I could feel at his being willing to do that. It went back through our whole life together.
The final paragraph in the book gets at this ambivalence from another angle:
I did not go home for my mother’s last illness or for her funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with. We could barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had a contempt for formal behavior, but why blame it on him? I felt the same. We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.
Returning home for the funeral seems an extravagant gesture, putting one’s survival at risk. Should we nevertheless regret not doing it? Is it good that we then forgive ourselves since doing so is a way of keeping on? As always, these are open questions with Munro. She acknowledges human complexity so deeply that she refuses to settle upon a final judgment.
