Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriag Essay Example For Students

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriag Essay e: Stories In Wild Swans a girl on a train, fondled by a minister, feels disgusted but also hugely curious. Munro describes as Ive never seen anyone else do how people put erotic memories, not always pleasant ones, to use over and over in their lives. 1. This paper reports that Rose is sitting on a train ride during which a self-described minister gropes her throughout the ride. She cannot take a stand against him, because she knows that the abuse is hidden and that her outcry will be deafened by an indifferent society. Most living writers are not, most of the time, reading one anothers work. They are reconsidering the classics. They are consuming cookbooks, comics, self-help manuals, mysteries, pornography, Martha Stewart (a variety of pornography for women). They are skimming biographies, dabbling in dictionaries. Writers are watching The Sopranos or learning, late in life, to play tennis. They are obsessing about their love affairs, their disappointing careers, their children. Every once in a while, though, a rumor burns through the tentative, decentralized community of American writers that a certain book must be owned. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, a new collection by Alice Munro, her tenth, has already incited writers to call one another on the telephone, to send e-mail exhortations, and in the extreme (writers are not profligate) to pay retail for more than one copy in order to give the book away. Every artist, brilliant, pretty good, or aspiring, has the same wish to make something beautiful and lasting and the concomitant capacity for awe in the presence of the serene achievement (as Conrad called Henry Jamess New York Editions). The highest compliment a critic can pay a short-story writer is to say that he or she is our Chekhov. More than one writer has made that claim for Alice Munro. Her genius, like Chekhovs, is quiet and particularly hard to describe, because it has the simplicity of the best naturalism, in that it seems not translated from life but, rather, like life itself. In analyzing another Russian writers transparent straightforwardness, James Wood described the critics frustration: Why are his characters so real? Because they are so individual. Why does his world feel so true? Because it is so real. And so on. It may be instructive, in trying to account for Munros disproportionate power, to consider Lady With Lapdog, arguably Chekhovs most famous and beloved story. Even after dozens of readings (in several translations) I still find it exceedingly difficult to pinpoint how the story works as deeply as it does. One might seize on the regular use of incongruities: the cynical philanderers thoughts of a young womans slender neck and beautiful eyes, followed by his impression that she is pathetic; the rou cutting a watermelon and eating it silently for a half hour while the woman sobs, thinking herself fallen after their first tryst; the open ending. Chekhov properly placed all statements about beauty, eternity, and falling in love right next to comic, breezy, urbane sentences, lending the impression that this young married woman and her older Muscovite lover, although particular to us, are not out of the human ordinary. Yet I could think of hal f a dozen stories to which one could fairly ascribe these same techniques of juxtaposition and tonal incongruity but which nonetheless lack this storys power. Likewise, I could strain to name a few writers who possess an immense lyric gift, in whose work a poets compression punctuates a novelists love of leisured complication, of time; yet their stories register altogether differently from Munros. Ann Close, Munros American editor since The Beggar Maid (1978), has described the experience of going back to a place in a story where she remembered a particular passage and finding that it had never been there. More than with other writers, Close said, with Alice, theres a huge amount between the lines. At the heart of all great naturalism is mystery, an emotional sum greater than its technical parts. I am not a sophisticated chronicler of literary reputation. I dont really know how famous Munro is. And perhaps with our particular favorites there is a tendency to downplay their popularit y. No one likes to think his or her taste is common. More than one high school girl has been dismayed to learn that the one boy she personally, idiosyncratically found cute is a general heartthrob. In the early eighties I asked friends who were traveling north of the border to find me anything they could by Alice Munro, and my copies of her first three books are Canadian paperbacks. In 1986, when The Progress of Love was published, she read to a full house in a large NYU auditorium (New Yorkers are prescient, and by then shed been publishing stories in their namesake magazine for almost ten years). I have a sense that whatever Munros reputation is (and it is lofty among writers, of that I am sure), it is not yet exactly what it should be. And the ways in which it is not quite what it should be are somehow murky and would seem to have little to do with literature. Lorrie Moore hinted at this recently in The Paris Review: I dont believe any serious reader would call her provincial, Mo ore said, but I also dont think it is often emphasized how she is the opposite. I can think of no better illustration of the universality of Alice Munros work than the memory of reading it in my twenties. I lived in a fifteenth-floor apartment in New York City, worked as an editor at The Paris Review, took the crosstown bus dressed in the city uniform of black stockings, skirts, and pumps bought on sale. My love affairs tended to be of the wistful variety from afar if not altogether imaginary. Yet I read Alice Munros stories of adulterous wives, and country girls gutting turkeys, with the page-turning avidity of someone discovering her own true future. The managing editor, Jeanne McCulloch, did the same. We read them deeply personally, to learn how to live. Without really garnering the permission of our boss, George Plimpton, we planned to interview Munro for The Paris Review. We hoped by this to achieve for her a kind of canonization. No writer in his right mind would have wanted c anonization to depend on us. Though we read the stories over and over, we were also terribly busy, figuring out not only the craft of writing rejection letters but also the tricks of making a living in New York City. We met Alice Munro and her editor at the Chelsea brownstone of her agent, Virginia Barber, where the three women seemed occupied and prosperous, in the middle of life. They talked about shopping with the exhilaration of serious women who dont often shop. We started the interview, and in the fashion typical of The Paris Review (often edited by would-be writers in their twenties), it languished for seven years. Making a case for Alice Munro in 2001 is not what making a case for Herman Melville would have been in the 1880s, or for Henry James at the time of the New York Editions, early in the 1900s. Since The Beggar Maid most reviews have been stellar; Munro has received all the major Canadian literary prizes and our National Book Critics Circle Award. (As a Canadian, she is not eligible for our National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize; Her last five books have not been short-listed for the Booker Prize, because the Booker no longer considers short-story collections.) So splitting hairs about precisely to which tier of the pantheon she belongs can feel a bit like carping that Proust, Joyce, and Kafka never won the Nobel Prize. But when educated general readers talk about the great living fiction writers, Munro isnt consistently mentioned with Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and John Updike. Three reasons come to mind. First, Munro writes about the lives of girls and women, to quote the title of her one novel, their conflicts, comedy, milestones, irony, and domestic detail, vacuuming and all. We are still, despite thirty years of feminism, a culture that considers the word domestic when applied to fiction to mean tamer and even less. Munros reach has become vast in recent collections, but her stories about the western expansion, about North Amer ican history, and even about murder are centered on a credible female character. Second, she, like the great majority of writers, has claimed a specific fictional geography, and hers-midwestern rural Canada does not have any particular edge or sexiness. Third, she writes short stories. The roughly contemporary writers most akin to her in sensibility, the late Illinoisan William Maxwell and the Irish William Trevor (both writers of exquisite short stories and also novels), share her relative obscurity. They, like Grace Paley, Isaac Babel, and Marilynne Robinson, are sometimes said to be writers writers, meaning that most people havent ever heard of them. Munros first three books, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), Lives of Girls and Women (1971), and Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), introduced her great themes shame and its connection to poverty, how class monkeys with sexual desire, the problems of a female artist in functioning satisfactorily as an artist or a female a nd also some of her leitmotifs: the glamour of airplanes, the changes in domestic life brought about by electrification and indoor plumbing, the recurring figure of a half-decrepit grandmother who is still an actor, however minor, in the household drama. An archetypal family emerges. The mother, refined and particular, strives for elegance even as her health is declining. She has a wealth of aunts and perhaps considers herself a little above her husbands family. The father remains upright and honorable, with necessary privacies; he is often a trapper of sorts (fox, mink, muskrat, marten), comfortable with a rougher male world outside, in possession of raucous relatives and perhaps a randy past. The fathers family is apt to play practical jokes, put uncooked beans in the soup, and throw forks and dishrags at one another. (A bad thing in that family was to have them say you were sensitive, as they did of my mother.) In Walker Brothers Cowboy, the first story in Munros first collection , the mother takes the Depression personally. Though casual readers may derive a sense that Munros characters come from the wrong side of the tracks, it seems to me that she writes about the construction of class not only in broad, upstairs-downstairs extremes (the husband rich, the wife a scholarship student) but also within families and communities whose differences appear invisible from the outside. She chronicles the nuances, snubs, and unsent invitations on which we build class and maintain it. Im not sure whether country girls still sleep with rich boys who come to the Canadian lakes for the summer, as they do in Thanks for the Ride. But what lingers, memorably, is the conundrum of why they ever did. It wasnt for money, or the hope of marriage. The old grandma, hovering in the living room, knows better than that. It seems to have been its own rough convention, the trophy of a certain glamour the glamour of just that night. Munro also returns again and again to the Jamesian sub ject of the artist. In her work, though, the artist is a woman in a small town, without the complications of recognition. There is a poetess in the wilds of nineteenth-century frontier Canada (Meneseteung), a violinist in the 1940s who dreams of leaving her baby outside to die (My Mothers Dream), and an aging piano teacher, Miss Marsalles, whose popularity is waning (Dance of the Happy Shades): Mary Lamberts girl no longer takes; neither does Joan CrimblesPiano lessons are not so important now as they once were; everybody knows that. Dancing is believed to be more favourable to the development of the whole child. HELPING THE HOMELESS EssayThe husband and wife here stay within their mythic traditional parade, but Munro gives them the dignity of the processions end while also including two counterpoints to the march: one of frivolity, in the wifes youthful glamour, her linen dress and white gloves, her knowledge of fashion trivia (Balmains exhortation to wear white gloves); the other the fugitive melody of an erotic betrayal, wound deeply and perhaps productively into this marriage. There is something I always hope for in fiction that has no literary term. Its best explained by analogy. In a certain painting by Degas a woman dries herself after a bath, one foot up on the rim of the tub, her whole body leaning over. Seeing that image, one might recognize a human position common in life but never before seen through the bending lens of representation. The same thing could be said for a shade of red in Mondrian. Munro gives us such recognitions. Her emotional palette is vast. Here is a portrait of a young woman, from Family Furnishings: After a lunch with the aunt she once idolized, full of country food, full also of emotion, from secrets revealed with their attendant burdens of guilt and sorrow, the young woman walks alone through the city. Her friends are away. Her fianc (who admired Hamlet but had no time for tragedy for the squalor of tragedy in ordinary life) is visiting his good-looking parents. She walks and walks, and then slips into a drugstore coffee shop, where the bitter black coffee tastes medicinal. She feels full not only of food but of people, of life. What soothes her as much as the coffee is the solitude, the urban anonymity: such happiness, to be alone. Ive never before seen the artists need for solitude as alleviation of fullness, an overload of life. There is a long line of idolized women in Munros stories, usually independent and childless, living emotionally extravagant, artistic lives, admired by shyer, more cautious, and often younger women. The ve ry real suffering and squalor endured by these idols is sometimes glimpsed in flashes, with the troubling suggestion that their more colorful ways may not all have been a matter of choice. But usually the younger woman is too much in the thick of her own life to pause long to consider the implications of these hardships for herself or her future. In real life, when Jeanne and I met her in Canada, Alice Munro lived in the two-story wooden house in which her second husband was born. She told us (a cautionary tale) that shed never had a house she really loved. She worked in the dining room, at a small table that held a manual typewriter. She said she often stood up before her dictionary, and spent hours there daydreamily composing. There were moments when we felt our generational difference: her two years at university were the only time in her life when she didnt have to do housework (we hoped there wasnt too too much housework looming in our futures). When her daughters were very sma ll, she worked during their naps. (This particularly consoled me. I intended to put down my future son for three or four naps daily.) There were silent spots in the interview, points too private and difficult to pursue, which seemed to have to do with prices paid for needing work while having children. We shook our heads; somehow it would be different for us. At moments even Munros casual conversation had the cadences of poetry, as in her description of a suburb in western Canada where she once lived: I was with the wives of the climbing men. But iambic or not, the suburbs, with their wives, were not where we hoped to live. She made it all seem not easy but possible. Later we sensed a vast gulf between the woman telling us how she made the thing and the thing itself, a gulf still containing the enormous my