A Work in Progress

The Wars by Timothy Findley

In his introduction to Timothy Findley's The Wars, author Guy Vanderhaeghe has put into words some of what I have been feeling about the book but have been unable to articulate adequately.  I'd been thinking about the story all weekend wondering what I was going to share about it when I finally got around to reading the introduction.  My copy is dog eared and pencil-marked from all the many parts that resonated with me or that felt especially important in the building up of the story.  I began by taking notes but soon had to abandon this as I didn't want to stop and write out what seemed important.  Everything seemed important was the problem. 

The Wars is a story of a young Canadian soldier who volunteers to fight in World War I.  Like so much of what I seem to be reading lately, it's a slim volume very carefully constructed, spare really, but each part necessary to the telling of the story, nothing superfluous.  I've been reading enough war literature in the last couple of years to know that so often these books are going to be harrowing, sometimes emotionally draining and not especially pleasant going at times. 

I can see why Penguin has published The Wars as a modern classic.  It is harrowing and at times brutal and for me gut wrenching, but it is quite beautiful as well.  As I read I was both apprehensive of what was coming but also in awe of what Findley was managing to do at the same time.  When I finished reading I have to say I was bereft.  Not because of what happened to Robert Ross, the Canadian solider, (though maybe a little for that, too) but because I had finished the book and there was no more.  And I wanted to go back to the first pages or even start at the end and work my way back to the beginning of the story to see just how did Findley do that? 

This is a story that is filled with imagery and weighted with meaning (hence all my dog ears and pencil markings) and Robert is a complex and at times contradictory character.  Attractive, a scholar and an athlete, he comes from a good, well-to-do family.  In the beginning he's only nineteen, perhaps a little naive, and is quite close to his older sister Rowena who is disabled as she was born with water on the brain and must remain in a wheelchair.  He told her once that she was the first human being he remembered seeing.  

"He was lying in his crib and, waking from a nap through half-closed eyes, he saw his sister gliding in her chair across the room and coming to rest beside him.  She stared at him for a long, long time and he stared back.  When she smiled, he thought she was his mother.  Later, when he came to realize she couldn't walk and never left the chair, he became her guardian."

He does look after Rowena, a gentle woman who loves animals.  Perhaps it's because of Rowena, what she meant to him and her gentleness, that caused everything that came after to happen.  Surely it helped shape Robert, so maybe the choices he made were inevitable.  Like all good war stories this is one that vividly shows the absurdity of war and what it does to the young men who must go and fight.  It shows how families are wrenched apart and what it does to mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters who look up to their elder siblings.  But, too, there are moments of humanity amidst the inhumanity and carnage. 

This is a story that is much like a patchwork quilt, which is not to belie the genius of Findley's prose and storytelling.  I'm still not entirely sure who narrates the story, but it's so seamlessly done that it didn't dawn on me until midway through the story that I didn't know who exactly was speaking, but he is a researcher who is piecing together Robert's experiences in the war and his motivations.  This is done through a variety of sources--photographs, trawling through archives and speaking with people who knew Robert.  What happens to Robert in the war is a tragedy, but whatever his culpability, he's still viewed as a hero by those who knew him.

I'm being intentionally vague and not filling in any of the details, for to do so would ruin the effect for anyone planning on reading The Wars.  The blurb describes the story as, "In this world gone mad, Robert Ross performed a last desperate act to declare his commitment to life in the midst of death", and I think that's really all you need to know setting off.  I was happy to note that one of the passages I marked and starred was something that was also noted in the introduction:

"People can only be found in what they do."

And for me, this distills what is behind Timothy Findley's The Wars.  The brilliance of the construction to show who Robert Ross was is the beauty of the story despite the brutality, the horrific scenes of trench warfare and the tragedy that is war.  For me, Timothy Findley's The Wars, is one of the very best and probably my favorite of all the books I've read so far for Caroline's Literature and War Readalong.  Certainly it is for me one of the most memorable.

Circling back to the beginning--I said Guy Vanderhaeghe put into words what I was feeling.  So I'll end with those.  He writes about rereading The Wars on the last leg of a long bus trip where he could feel each bump of the road and was threatened by motion sickness:

"At intervals I would look up to rest my eyes on the surround of blackness pressing against the window, then plunge back into the story of Robert Ross, his family, his friends, and his comrades-in-arms as they whirled helplessly in the maelstrom of the Great War, the war that was supposed to end all wars and didn't.  I arrived at  my destination with the book finished, strangely exulted and disturbed by an encounter with a novel harrowing and uplifting, a novel that was both a marvellous work of art and a passionate indictment of the first cruel idiocy of the twentieth century."

This is a novel that begs to be revisited and I am sure I will do so someday.

You can read Caroline's thoughts on the book here.  I also read this along with Buried in Print and we've been chatting about it behind the scenes.  Next up is Anna Funder's All That I Am.  Although I didn't finish last month's The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen, I do plan to pick the book up once again and think I am once again in the right frame of mind to finally tackle it. 

Alice Munro's The Progress of Love

I've heard more than one person call Alice Munro one of (maybe even 'the') best short story writers working today, and I have to concur.  I don't read as many short stories as I'd like, but in the last few years I've gotten much better at making a conscious effort to at least dip into collections.  It's going to be one of my goals next year to read more--more short stories and more by Alice Munro.  If you think you aren't a short story sort of reader, give Alice Munro a try and you may very well change your mind.  The Progress of Love is Munro's sixth book (fifth story collection) published in 1986, and it won the Governor General's Award that same year.

There's something really satisfying about reading a story by Alice Munro.  You feel like you've been somewhere and seen something, and certainly you feel like you've experienced something.  I feel a little voyeuristic when I read a story by Alice Munro, as if I've gotten a glimpse into someone's private world and gotten a little insight into the human condition.  And she manages to do all this in as few as thirty pages.  I've already written about all but the last three of the stories in the collection, but I wanted to wrap things up and gather a few thoughts about the stories into one post before I move on to another of her books.

The title story, The Progress of Love, is an intergenerational story told from the perspective of a daughter looking back on the memory of her mother when she discovers she has passed away.  In turn that memory opens out to yet another memory of her mother thinking back on her own youth.  Although the story seems to move around in time it's Phemie's memories building upon each other and revealing an occurrence in her childhood, and with each fresh recollection the reader sees how memory can trick us and how perceptions are often so different than reality and from the reality of those around us.

On the surface Lichen is a wonderful character study.  It's a story of a marriage where neither of the pair is depicted in a very favorable light--the woman because she's viewed through the eyes of a critical husband, and the man simply because he's something of a slimy character.  But once again Munro gives the story breadth and depth that belie the simplicity of the narration.

Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux is the story of two brothers.  It's a quietly revealing sort of story--seemingly placid on the surface but always with Munro, lots going on underneath.  Often in an Alice Munro story it feels as though not a lot happens, yet by the end you feel like you've somehow been intimately involved with these characters--lived inside their heads for a while and know them or people like them.  Here she slowly builds up to an epiphany of sorts, which is reached by way of a past occurrence that throws light on the characters' actions and behavior.

Miles City, Montana is a story, to take it directly from the narrative--of trust and forgiveness--a lesson that can only be learned through time and experience.  The story opens with a death, recalled by the narrator when she was young, and then goes on to relive the experience in an even more intimate and horrifying way.

Some of Alice Munro's stories linger in my mind and Fits is just such a story.  It is both interesting and perplexing.  Interesting because it deals with a murder-suicide (which kind of feels like unusual ground for an Alice Munro story--but then again maybe not, since I think the point isn't exactly the murder-suicide but how people react to it).  Perplexing because the story felt rather open ended. 

The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink is another of my favorite stories from the collection.  It is a really brilliant story of memory (like so many of her stories seem to often be about) and reality and how closeness can turn into alienation.  Once again it's beautifully layered with apparent simplicity, but really quite complex and meaningful.

In Jesse and Meribeth Munro examines the truths and falsehoods of a friendship between two young girls.  Once again in this story, Jesse tells of her experience in this friendship from the vantage point of adulthood, though she's looking back over this progression of events as though she's reliving them and firmly back in her young adulthood.

In Eskimo the simple act of people watching on a holiday flight to Tahiti shows the inner workings of one woman's mind.  In the story Munro juxtaposes two couples, the narrator who is having an affair with a married man and an Eskimo woman traveling with a much older man.  The imaginings of the narrator reveal more about herself than the Eskimo woman's assumed predicament. 

"Queer Streak" follows the arc of one woman's life (yes, in one short story Alice Munro can convey an entire lifetime), and how a series of anonymous letters written to her father derailed her love life.  But maybe for the better.

"Circle of Prayer" is a story within a story--ostensibly about the death of a schoolfriend of the narrator's daughter, but in reality a meditation on life's larger questions and meanings.

The last story, "White Dump", focuses on a shared memory of three women.  Like so many of Munro's stories it is complex and multilayered.  Most of the stories in this collection take place in rural Ontario and occasionally in Toronto.  She has a knack for evoking the Depression-era (or maybe I just especially like the stories with this historical slant), and often seems to come at a subject from a variety of angles as well she likes to move around in time within a story.  There is always more than meets the eye in a Munro story and they call out to be reread and discussed. 

I've started reading her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, but with all my other reading at the moment I've not made very good progress so far.  I'm hoping to read her newest collection, Dear Life, in January along with Buried in Print who is reading her books in the order they were published. 

The Way the Crow Flies

Every once in a while a book will come along that is pretty much pitch perfect.  Everything comes together in just the right way--good writing, a well plotted story, fine characterizations, weighty subject matter dealt with with sensitivity but in such a manner that you can't help turning the pages even when it's almost unbearable knowing what is coming (and you can almost see it coming, but the author still manages to floor you in the end). 

Ann-Marie MacDonald's The Way the Crow Flies is just such a book for me.  I finished it in October, but the task of writing about it has felt so monumental that I keep putting it off.  And now the year is nearing the end and I want to make sure I give it the attention it deserves even if I feel like I won't be able to write about it adequately (hence my putting off writing about it for so long).  It's quite a chunky book weighing in at over 800 pages.  I could have went back to the beginning when I finished and started reading all over again.  It's a book that I will happily reread someday (maybe even sooner than later).  I even bought a new copy to give a coworker who I know will love it as much as I did, and I can't wait to thrust it into her hands and urge her to read it over the holiday break.

So now the problem (and what I've been trying to figure out since October) is how much to tell you to convince you to take a look at the book, too, without giving too much away.  I went into the book knowing very little about it, letting the story unfold before me and tugging me along, allowing all the details to settle in my mind, letting the light bulbs go off in just the right sequence so I could piece it all together.  There were moments during that process that were excruciating, but in a good way.  Having an idea of what was coming yet not being entirely sure--sometimes being proven right and other times wrong made for compelling reading.  That's the best way to experience this book. 

Steeped in the culture of the 1960s the story focuses primarily on one family living on an Air Force Base on the Canadian border.  Centralia has all the outward appearances of being a wholesome little community where neighbors are friends and people don't need to lock their doors at night.  There is an innocence to the time and the people and the place even coming out of the horrors of the Second World War, which is still close enough to be a memory yet distant enough for the future to look bright and rosy where all things are possible--even putting a man on the moon.

For eight-year-old Madeleine childhood is a happy place within her tight-knit family.  She idolizes her father Jack who to her young eyes can do no wrong.  Her Acadian mother, Mimi, is firm but loving.  And older brother Mike a typical boy who dreams of flying military jets like his father once trained to do, but was invalided out of the war early on.  But maybe the Sixties were never quite as innocent as they seemed.  Centralia is a fresh start for the McCarthys who were formerly living in West Germany.  They arrive full of hope and optimism, with no greater expectations really than leading a good and happy life.

In books as in life the worst things can happen to the best people and sometimes they happen purely by chance, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And good people can make bad decisions.  Or hard decisions.  Jack McCarthy is a good man, and an honorable man, and it is just that honor that he tries so hard to uphold that lands him in a difficult position that will have repercussions for his family and community that will resound for many years after they've left Centralia. 

It's through Madeleine's innocent eyes that this world is viewed and experienced.  But Madeleine's own world implodes while the adults around her are dealing with their own 'adult' problems.  Madeleine is a  marvelous character, full of humor and insight--the sort of insight that comes with innocence even if it isn't really understood.  And twenty years after her family has left Centralia she is still trying to make sense of what happened that year in 1962.

This is a story that reads like the best thriller, has elements of a mystery about it but is complex and sophisticated in what it sets out to accomplish.  It's a morality tale of sorts and an exploration of the memory of not only the individual but of the collective memory of a society.  I recently mentioned that books often make me feel all tingly.  Well, this particular book makes me feel all tingly because what Ann-Marie MacDonald managed is such an impressive feat.  If I've made you curious, do give the story a go.  And don't be intimidated by the length as it reads very fast.  

I read MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees about six years ago.  While I found it a little harder to get into, once the story began to really roll, I couldn't put it down either.  I have every intention of revisiting it as well and plan on digging around my bookshelves over the break to find my copy.  Something to look forward to.    

Windflower by Gabrielle Roy

My already long list of authors whose work I want to read all of has just grown by one more.  I've added French Canadian author Gabrielle Roy to the list.  Although not her best known or perhaps her most acclaimed work, Windflower (La Rivière sans repos translated by Joyce Marshall) was recommended to me by Buried in Print, and it was an excellent place to start reading.  It deals not just with a mixed race child but the entire community in which he grows up.  Jimmy Kumachuk is a much loved child, but he is a boy who lives between two disparate groups of people not entirely part of either.  I always find stories like this fascinating--reading about the sense of dislocation people feel when traveling (both literally and figuratively) between cultures--in this case the Inuit and white communities.

Elsa Kumachuk reminds me just the tiniest bit of Emma Bovary.  They don't really resemble each other and their stories are really quite different, but like Emma, Elsa is a dreamer.  She sees the world not as the harsh place it is or can be but has a more romanticized view of it.  The story opens with Elsa returning home from seeing a movie with her girlfriends (there were two shows a week--one for whites and one for Eskimos as the local pastor thought it best not to mix the groups) when she is pulled into a thicket of trees and raped.  But it's with a bland sort of acceptance that Elsa deals with her situation.  

"She herself seemed neither depressed nor pleased.  It was a thing that happened.  That it should happen before marriage caused no discredit here.  Rather the contrary.  Elsa's parents displayed no indignation.  They confined themselves to teasing her: so she'd been in a hurry to taste it, had she?"

The child that arrives as a result is obviously the son of an American GI who will soon leave the beautiful but bleak coldness of northern Labrador for the sweltering jungles of Vietnam, but it matters not a whit to Elsa or her family.  She gives birth without a whimper, and then "everything changed for her".  Such a beautiful little boy.

"Elsa looked, and what she saw caught her by surprise, took her breath away so completely it seemed it would never be restored."

And she becomes subsumed by little Jimmy.  She herself is dark and small and Jimmy all lightness and pale features.  She spends hours caring for him, bathing him and dressing him.  She begins working in the home of the local policeman and his wife when she would prefer to spend all her time with Jimmy.  But when she sees what she can buy for the child with her wages, she cannot bear to give up her job.  And everything Madame Beaulieu says, all her advice, is taken to heart by Elsa.  She "took advice from no one but the white people".

The entire Eskimo community loves Jimmy, however.  Perhaps for his fairness and fine features?  Elsa now compares her life and that of her family to those of the white community and her own is found wanting.  No longer is her parent's hut or the lackadaisical way he's taken care of good enough.  She would take Jimmy to a special place on the beach away from everyone else to picnic and play, beyond the homes and reach of her family, but she's reproached by the local pastor for her extremes.  Before she was all carelessness and now all care and he fears she will only raise Jimmy to be ashamed of her Eskimo family and their ways.  

And so the pendulum swings the other way.  It's for her own sake as much as for Jimmy's that she takes him across the river to an older settlement where her uncle lives away from almost everyone to raise him more purely and simply and closer to her Eskimo heritage.  The fear is already a small seed planted in her mind of the possibility of losing Jimmy.

"If she were not careful, the white men would be quite capable of one day or another of taking him away from her--the more so as he was one of their own and she had never felt tht her own right to him was complete.  This is what she gathered finally from the pastor's warning.  And so it was that the resolution to flee everything that had once so attracted her took possession of Elsa's mind." 

For a while the two live blissfully with Elsa's uncle, but the outside world again encroaches when Jimmy is old enough to go to school.  And what Elsa fears comes to pass, but not in exactly the way she had thought.  The pendulum swings back again and they return to their Eskimo community but live half in and half out of the white world for Jimmy cannot be mistaken for an Inuit boy despite Elsa being his mother.  It's with great difficulty and little success that the two try to live in both worlds.  Elsa gives everything in order for Jimmy to have all the advantages due him.  She gives so much that nothing is left for herself and in the end she still loses her son.

"But all at once she sensed the uselessness of going on.  Several times already she had felt that she was being stared at by her own child with the same cool measuring quality she had seen in the eyes of the soldiers as they filed by on the icy road.  Today there was scarcely anymore doubt: Jimmy was looking at her with the eyes of a stranger." 

Windflower is an often sad and poignant story of motherhood, identity and of a society undergoing tremendous changes.  The editor describes the underlying theme as "how to live" and certainly Roy raises many thoughtful questions that are as pertinent today as when the book was published in 1970.  My copy now has lots of dog-eared pages and I can imagine this story being an excellent one to provoke some good discussions.  I've already acquired two more of her novels and a book of short stories and I'm looking forward to reading more by her soon. 

The Progress of Love: Eskimo

The nice thing about reading a book (or short story in this case) along with another reader is being able to bump ideas around and get different perspectives on what's really going on below the surface.  I've come to realize very quickly that with Alice Munro that there is always something more going on below the surface.  Sure you can just read for enjoyment, but I somehow feel I'm getting just a little more insight into the human predicament by trying to figure out the motivations or inner world of a character.

In "Eskimo" from the collection The Progress of Love the simple act of people watching on a holiday flight to Tahiti shows the inner workings of one woman's mind.  I'm not sure I have any answers really, but I feel like I am at least getting better at formulating the questions when it comes to Munro's intentions.

Alice Munro is very good at telling a story within a story within a story, or another way of putting it--presenting a story in a complex manner that doesn't really feel all that complex at first.  It's only when you step back and really look at what's actually happened do you see the set up.  And she often tells her stories in a way that you're thinking they are about one thing when really it's the way the story is refracted back on the narrator that's the focus of it all. 

Mary Jo is a nurse who grew up in a small town in Huron County.  After she had her nursing degree for a few years she began working in a Toronto office for Dr. Streeter, and man she admires enormously, and with whom she's been carrying on an affair with.  She lives above the surgery and has been slowly making efforts to improve her looks--lightening her hair, fixing her teeth, which she had always been self-conscious about, and buying new clothes.  Dr. Streeter doesn't seem to mind--he jokes with her that she had better not get "too glamorous".  The trip to Tahiti is his gift to her, but it's not a secret rendezvous as the doctor's daughter knows all about the trip.  Maybe not the affair.   

The story is told from Mary Jo's perspective.  She thinks about her relationship with the doctor, and her conversations with his daughter.  About the doctor's wife who is always "working on" some new project or person.  But mostly she watches and thinks about the people on the plane around her.  The harmless families with their fuss and accumulation of things ("what accumulation and display and satisfaction, just because they have managed to reproduce").

It's one couple in particular, however, that catches Mary Jo's interest and attention.  An older well dressed man with a younger woman who wears a childish ponytail and eyes with a definite slant.  She imagines them to be foreign, maybe even from Afghanistan, and has in her mind created a whole story around them.  But it turns out they are Canadian just like she is.  The young woman tells Mary Jo she's 'Eskimo' and the man is métis.  Mary Jo can't help but think that surely that's not the proper word anymore, rather it's 'Inuit'.  The pair seem to be quarreling and the girl admits to being only sixteen.  When she shows concern for the girl and offers help, she's subtly rebuffed.  And she imagines Dr. Streeter would think it is just self-indulgent good intentions that do more harm than good.

I can't help but think there is something about the juxtaposition of the two couples--Mary Jo and Dr. Streeter and the man and young woman that Munro is getting at.  But this is a story that leaves me with more questions than answers.  Even enigmatically, Munro tells a good story, though like Mary Jo I think I'd prefer to go to Greece or Scandinavia or Ireland over Tahiti, too.

Next up is "A Queer Streak".  Only three stories left in my first collection of stories by Alice Munro.  And still many more stories to explore.   

The Progress of Love: Jesse and Meribeth

There comes a point in a story, particularly in a short story, where there is a hook or maybe an epiphany of sorts.  Where there is finally a hint of where the author is going or what she's doing and you can begin following the trajectory towards the finish.  In Alice Munro's "Jesse and Maribeth" from her collection The Progress of Love it comes when one of two friends lies about an amorous adventure.  It was meant to be a tease and then when a little time passed she was going to give in and admit the joke.

"I didn't at all mind the lying.  Once I had taken the plunge into falsehood--by saying Mr. Cryderman's name--falsehood felt wonderfully comfortable,"

This says much about the narrator that only in retrospect have I decided showed poor judgement or just plain carelessness in her friendship with a schoolfriend.  It was only one in a number of signs of what was to come.  

"In high school, I had a tender, loyal, boring friendship with a girl named MaryBeth Crocker.  I gave myself up to it, as I did to the warm, shallow, rather murky waters of the Maitland River in summer, when I lay on my back, and just fluttered my hands and feet, and was carried downriver."

When one day at school MaryBeth, short and rather chubby but graceful, sits down next to Jesse in order to share a songbook, Jesse is a little stunned at being chosen.  Once again in this story, Jesse tells of her experience in this friendship from the vantage point of adulthood, though she's looking back over this progression of events as though she's reliving them and firmly back in her young adulthood.  There is no jumping around in time in this story. 

Very early on there's a hint just what sort of friendship the two are (or are not in this case) going to have.

"In the books I had read all through my childhood, girls were bound two by two in fast friendship, in exquisite devotion.  They promised never to tell each other's secrets or keep anything hidden from each other, or form a deep and lasting friendship with any other girl."

The two become fast and close friends--even changing the spelling of their names to Jessie and Meribeth, though the teachers fail to recognize Jessie's spelling as they do Meribeth's.  Despite their closeness sometimes Jesse finds herself "slipping away" while MaryBeth talked.

"Not that I wished to be elsewhere, or even to be alone.  I understood that this was what friendship was like."

And maybe the friendship between adolescents is just like that and it's only with time and experience does friendship become real and more meaningful?  In her third year of high school Jesse is begins to work for a married couple, the Crydermans, doing simple tasks like getting the vegetables ready for dinner or ironing.  But Jesse finds herself more caught up in the drama of their marriage.  Mrs. Cryderman, older than her husband, is unhappily expecting a baby and recounts to Jesse bits of her life, her fears and displeasures.

"However much I mocked the Crydermans to MaryBeth, I wanted something from them.  Attention. Recognition."

And that's where the lie comes in.  Talking one afternoon about sex, spurred on by the visits of MaryBeth's sister's boyfriend to their room (MaryBeth living with her older sister rather than her parents), she begins concocting a story involving Mr. Cryderman.

"The affair I conducted that spring with Mr. Cryderman--in my head, and in front of MaryBeth--may not have been that important in my life, but it kept me busy.  There was no more sense of drift and boredom, when MaryBeth and I were together."

And when MaryBeth finally calls Jesse on her falsehoods, their friendship falls apart.  Jesse takes it as an excuse to act poorly towards her once close friend, and it separates the two for good.  Until one day when Jesse is a grad student and she comes across MaryBeth who's working for an insurance agent.  By then the Crydermans have long been gone, moved away with their baby.  Without malice MaryBeth begins chatting away as though their friendship had never ended or been strained.

So perhaps it is the "progress of love" (or here maybe friendship) that it's with a certain fondness that MaryBeth recalls their friendship even while Jesse "had been herself all along"--even now unaccountable.  I like how Munro comes at this story--from a mirror-like perspective.  Jesse tells the story, but MaryBeth is the one who grows. 

Do take a look at Buried in Print's thoughts on the story--as usual she sheds good light on the story and fills in bits that I missed.  Next week sometime (it being a holiday week so I might not be around much) I'll be reading the next story: "Eskimo". 

The Progress of Love: The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink

What seems to be a common set up in Alice Munro's work (which I like very much by the way) is a story about the past bookended by events occurring in the present.  Such is the manner in which "The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink" is told.  And she's also very good at evoking the past, what I imagine to be the Depression-era, though it's not stated explicitly in the story.  Little hints are dropped to help form an image in the reader's mind, but it's subtly done.

A widower of sixty-nine, Sam has returned to the small town of Gallagher on his way from Vancouver to Pennsylvania.  It's been many years since he was last there and a visit to a confectionery shop owned by a woman he once knew is the opening needed for the story to move swiftly back many  years.

"Callie Kernaghan was nineteen when Sam and Edgar Grazier first saw her, and she could have passed for twelve.  A demon worker.  Some people called her a drudge, Miss Kernaghan's little drudge, or they called her slavey--Slavey Kernaghan."

At the time Miss Kernaghan ran a boardinghouse where Sam and his cousin Edgar lived while attending business college.  The two were nearly inseparable and seemed almost like brothers than mere cousins.  Their real love was acrobatics and they would practice in the evenings to the chagrin of Miss Kernaghan who would lament so much physical activity--no doubt causing an increase in appetite when she served rather frugal meals to her boarders.

The memories of Gallagher and Kernaghan's boardinghouse are filtered through Sam's memory.  As young men Edgar was the more attractive and perhaps more daring as well.  Neither ever had much money, what little might be used to supplement their meager meals.  It certainly wasn't put towards clothes, as what they wore marked them as farm boys.  It's the local skating rink that was the big draw for both young men, but admission was steep so they took to sneaking in through a high window and opening a back door from the inside letting in the other boy and Callie who would accompany them. 

"Callie's life was work.  So anything that wasn't work--that was a thrill for her.  But he wondered--how did they persuade her?  It must have been a dare.  Making friends with a testy and suspicious dog, and later on it had been like making friends with the twelve-year-old she looked to be."

Callie, a foundling, who was taken in by Miss Kernaghan and whose history is revealed in the course of the story becomes friends, and perhaps something more, with the two cousins.  She puts on boys' clothes for their skating excursions.  In a show of solidarity she follows the two when they decide to abandon Gallagher for Toronto where they believe they'll earn their living through their acrobatics.  The impetus for leaving, though, is the fear Edgar has that Callie has become pregnant after the trio experimented sexually one night. 

"They didn't feel as if they were caught.  Right away they had understood that Callie hadn't come to bring them back.  She was joining them in her boy's clothes, she reminded them of the cold nights of luck and cunning, the plan went without a hitch, the free skating, speed and delight, deception and pleasure."

But a wedge has been jammed between the boys, and their friendship will never be the same.  Those happy, carefree moments spent in each other's company has passed and will never be quite the same.  It's daring Edgar who ends up leading the predictable, quiet life and Sam who goes away for other adventures and successes.

This is a really brilliant story of memory (like so many of her stories seem to often be about) and reality and how closeness can turn into alienation.  Once again it's beautifully layered with apparent simplicity, but really quite complex and meaningful.

“The moment of happiness he shared with them remained in his mind, but he never knew what to make of it. Do such moments really mean, as they seem to, that we have a life of happiness with which we only occasionally, knowingly, intersect? Do they shed such light before and after all that has happened to us in our lives - or that we’ve made happen - can be dismissed?”

Next week:"Jesse and Meribeth".  Already am halfway through the collection!  Check out Buried in Print's take on the story--always nice to read along with someone else and get a different perspective. 

The Progress of Love: Fits

Alice Munro's story "Fits" in her collection The Progress of Love is both interesting and perplexing.  (Possible spoilers to follow).  Interesting because it deals with a murder-suicide (which kind of feels like unusual ground for an Alice Munro story--but then again maybe not, since I think the point isn't exactly the murder-suicide but how people react to it).  Perplexing because the story felt rather open ended.  I think the questions Munro was asking weren't really answered.  As always though, I think an Alice Munro story can easily be read and reread and new things found each time.

Once again she begins with a teaser of a first sentence.  "The people who died were in their early sixties."  The couple had dropped by Peg and Robert Kuiper's house on Boxing Day for cocktails.  They are neighbors in the small town of Gilmore and had just recently returned from a trip to Mexico.  The story quickly turns to Peg and Robert, however, and their marriage and history together.  She, divorced with two sons, and he returned to the town to take over his father's chain of stores.  Munro strings together bits of facts moving back and forth between the Kuipers and the discovery of their dead neighbors.

"It was entirely by accident that Peg was the one who found them."

She had been dropping off eggs from a local farmer to the Weebles when she realized something was amiss.  When Robert had left for work in the morning he wondered about the fact that the Weebles' car was in the drive but their sidewalks hadn't been cleared of snow.  He'd understood that the Weebles hadn't been at home so was confused by the pristine pile of snow in front of their house.  He hadn't thought beyond that, however.  Such mundane details that you take in but don't process.  This story is filled with them.

It's almost halfway into the story that the realization dawns that something awful has happened.  Not just the death of the Weebles, but the fact that husband killed wife and then turned the rifle on himself.  What's more interesting is how Peg responds to the murder and how her reaction, or lack thereof, irritates those around her.

"For a Gilmore person, Peg is reserved.  She came up to the woman and relieved her of the eggs she was holding, while Robert went on assuring her that it was no trouble and asking about the daughter-in-law's pregnancy.  Peg smiled as she would smile in the store when she gave you change--a quick transactional smile, nothing personal,  She is a small slim woman with a cap of soft brown hair, freckles, and a scrubbed, youthful look.  She wears pleated skirts, fresh neat blouses buttoned up to the throat, pale sweaters, sometimes black ribbon tie.  She moves gracefully and makes very little noise.  Robert once told her he had never met anyone so self-contained as she was.  (His women have usually been talkative, stylishly effective, though careless about some of the details, tense, lively, 'interesting.')"

"Peg said she didn't know what he meant."

She found the bodies, then got into her car and went to the police to explain what she saw.  Then arrived at the family's store to begin work not bothering to tell the clerk or call her husband, who had been working out of town, with the news of what she had encountered earlier.  "I knew you'd find out pretty soon", she replies to the clerk when asked why she never mentioned the news.

Gilmore is a small town and naturally everyone is curious about what happened and the townspeople are busy putting forward all sorts of theories as to why.  Robert gets the story first from the local sheriff at the diner where he stopped to eat and then later from Peg at home.  Throughout the telling she's calm, as calm as she was when she found the bodies.  Speculation over the nature of the relationship the Weebles has turns to memories by her son of Peg's relationship with her first husband.  And the fights they had, which her son thought would end in bloodshed as well, which shocks Peg.

"Robert believed it was time that he said something."

"'What this is like,' he said, 'it's like an earthquake or a volcano.  It's a kind of fit.  People can take a fit like the earth takes a fit.  But it only happens once in a long while.  It's a freak occurrence'."

"'Earthquakes and volcanoes aren't freaks, said Clayton (Peg's son), with a certain dry pleasure.  'If you want to call that a fit, you'd have to call it a periodic fit.  Such as people have, married people have'."

"'We don't,' said Robert.  He looked at Peg as if waiting for her to agree with him." 

 

But she doesn't.  She doesn't say anything.

Fits and fights.  Maybe lies.  Is not telling the facts the same as telling a lie?  A detail, a discrepancy in the story.  What was left out?  Peg's version of events doesn't quite match the explanation by the police constable of the scene.  So the perplexing bit is why Peg lied.  Again, an interesting juxtaposition of a murdered married couple, a marriage (Peg and Robert) which seems happy enough, and the little cracks beneath the surface (well, the cracks perhaps began in former relationships), or the possibility of cracks happening in the surface to Peg and Robert. 

Why does reading an Alice Munro story seem like such an easy thing when you're doing it, but when you're writing about it after the fact becomes so  much more complicated?

The Progress of Love: Miles City, Montana

The thing about short stories is you never know quite what you're getting.  Like a box of chocolates that has no description of the contents, you just have to try your luck.  It always takes a few paragraphs, sometimes even a few pages to orient myself and figure out what's happening and why.  Sometimes the why takes longer and a little effort, but with Alice Munro, it's always worth it.  How's this for an opening for her story "Miles City, Montana" in The Progress of Love:

"My father came across the field carrying the body of the boy who had been drowned.  There were several men together, returning from the search, but he was the one carrying the body.  The men were muddy and exhausted, and walked with their heads down, as if they were ashamed.  Even the dogs were dispirited, dripping from the cold river.  When they all set out, hours before, the dogs were nervy and yelping, the men tense and determined, and there was a constrained, unspeakable excitement about the whole scene.  It was understood that they might find something horrible."

Don't you want to keep reading?  I did.  Who's the boy?  What happened to him?  And who is telling the story?  Initially you don't know who the narrator is--a child perhaps?  Boy or girl?  I thought a boy, but over the course of a few pages the reader learns the story is narrated by a woman telling the story from the vantage point of adulthood.  Munro seems to like this layered sort of storytelling.  The action takes place over the course of time, often moving around in time, but usually it's a matter of someone looking back at events that shaped their life or an event in the past that throws light on some other big event in their more recent history.  (Possible spoilers coming).  

The latter is the case here.  This death of a small boy opens the story.  The drowned boy has no mother or even any other woman in his life "to receive Steve Gauley and give him his due of grief".  Only a father who is a hired man, a drinker but not a drunk.

"His fatherhood seemed accidental, and the fact that the child had been left with him when the mother went away, and that they continued living together, seemed accidental."

But for all his faults, the narrator doesn't hold him in contempt, unlike the other adults attending the funeral.

"I felt a furious and sickening disgust.  Children sometimes have an access of disgust concerning adults.  The size, the lumpy shapes, the bloated power.  The breath, the coarseness, the hairiness, the horrid secretions.  But this was more.  And the accompanying anger had nothing sharp and self-respecting about it."

Flash forward twenty years or so and the reader finally discovers that the narrator is a woman, now a mother herself.  She and her husband are traveling cross country from Vancouver by way of the US to Ontario to visit their parents. 

"What we are doing this for, I thought, and the answer came--to show off.  To give Andrew's mother and my father the pleasure of seeing their grandchildren.  That was our duty.  But beyond that we wanted to show them something.  What strenuous children we were, Andrew and I, what relentless seekers of approbation."

It's summer, and it's hot.  Their daughters sit in the backseat watching the cities and states go by.  They want a beach, somewhere cool or somewhere to cool off.  Maybe the next city will have a pool and they can stop for a dip.  And by chance they do find one, but it's closed for lunch and the family can't wait.  They talk the lifeguard into letting the girls take a quick swim and then they'll be on their way.  And as the mother walks away to find a cool drink, leaving the girls in the care of the lifeguard who watches over them while she eats her lunch, she has an overwhelming feeling of fear.

"Where are the children?"

It takes only a moment.  One glance away.  A kiss bestowed by a boyfriend.  An older sister turned away watching the pair in fascination.  And the younger sister sees something at the bottom of the pool she wants.  But she doesn't realize just how deep the water is and plunges in head first.  Pure terror for the parents.     

The story finally wraps around, and the reader discovers just why the narrator brought up the death of the little boy she knew so many years ago in childhood.  It's not just the death, and the circumstances and the fear of it all being repeated, but the understanding--now as an adult herself--of what the adults experienced.  She now sees it all from the other angle.

"When I stood apart from my parents at Steve Gauley's funeral and watched them, and had this new, unpleasant feeling about them, I thought that I was understanding something about them for the first time.  It was a deadly serious thing.  I was understanding they were implicated.  Their big, stiff, dressed-up bodies did not stand between me and sudden death, or any kind of death.  They gave consent.  So it seemed. They gave consent to the death of children and to my death not by anything they said or thought but by the very fact that they had made children--they had made me.  They had made me, and for that reason my death--however grieved they were, however they carried on--would seem to them anything but impossible or unnatural.  This was a fact, and even then I knew they were not to blame."

This is a story, to take it directly from the narrative--of trust and forgiveness--a lesson that can only be learned through time and experience.

Alice Munro is brilliant.  Have I already said that?  I'm joining Buried in Print's ongoing reading project as she works her way through all of Alice Munro's story collections in the order they were published.  I only wish I had joined in at the start.  Next week's story is "Fits".  Do you think it's weird to read two books by one author concurrently?  I am itching to go back and read Munro's first story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades.  I've always been too greedy when it comes to books and stories, but when I read Alice Munro I really can't help myself.

The Progress of Love: "Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux"

The 'Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux' in this week's Alice Munro story is the brother of a school teacher.  He's so dubbed by a class of French students as he's seen mowing the school lawns wearing a rather eccentric get up.

"Ross was wearing two hats.  One was the green-and-white peaked cap he had got last summer at the feed store, and the other one, on top, was the old floppy hat of pinkish straw that their mother wore in the garden."

It's obvious that Colin is protective of his younger brother who is perhaps mentally challenged (the school principal calls him "independent") yet skilled mechanically.  Ross spends a great deal of time at Colin's home, since he has a house and yard large enough to accommodate the car he's working on--transplanting a new motor into the body of an old car. 

Much of the story is taken up with setting the scene and forming the various characters--brothers Colin and Ross, their mother Sylvia and her boyfriend, Colins' wife Glenna and their daughter Lynnette, and Glenna's friend (the French teacher), Nancy.  It feels sometimes as though not a lot happens in an Alice Munro story, yet by the end you feel like you've somehow been intimately involved with these characters--lived inside their heads for a while and know them or people like them.  She slowly builds up to an epiphany of sorts, usually reached by way of some past occurrence that throws light on the characters actions and behavior.

Sorry this passage is a bit long, but I loved it for the strong visual it gives.  Reading it I feel like a fly on the wall--and just what sort of image do you get of Sylvia and Ross?

"And the house--the same Insul-brick-covered cottage Sylvia and Ross and Colin had always lived in--was so full of furniture and junk some rooms had turned into passageways.  Most surfaces were piled high with magazines, newspapers, plastic and paper bags, catalogues, circulars, and fliers for sales that had come and gone, in some cases for businesses that had folded and products that had disappeared from the market.  In any ashtray or ornamental dish you might find a button or two, keys, cutout coupons promising ten cents off, an earring, a cold capsule still in its plastic wrap, a vitamin pill turning to powder, a mascara brush, a broken clothespin.  And Sylvia's cupboards were full of all kinds of cleaning fluids and polishes--not the regular kind bought in stores, but products supposedly of unique and dazzling effectiveness, signed for at parties.  She was kept broke paying for all the things she had signed for at parties--cosmetics, pots and pans, baking utensils, plastic bowls.  She loved giving and going to those parties, also bridal showers and baby showers, and goodbye showers for her co-workers leaving the hospital.  Here in these deeply cluttered rooms, she had dispensed, on her own, a great deal of careless, hopeful hospitality."

Ross has a good relationship with his brother and Glenna, and they in turn show him a great deal of affection, but he's an unusual man given to moments of unpredictability.  In school he had such a crush on a classmate that she had to not only to stop playing basketball, she took to hiding in the girls' bathroom and eventually had to change schools.  He once sat on a piece of pie he had been eating during class when the teacher yelled at him.

"'I didn't do it to be funny!' Ross told Glenna.  'I just couldn't think what to do with the pie but stick it underneath me'."

It's at a family picnic as reminiscences of the time Colin "shot Ross dead" does the reader understand just how closely interlinked the lives are of the two brothers.  How much Colin will has had to and will have to continue looking after Ross.

"Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux" is a quietly revealing sort of story--seemingly placid on the surface but always with Munro, lots going on underneath.

Next up is "Miles City, Montana".  I'm reading along with Buried in Print who has been methodically working through all of Munro's short stories.  Anyone who's like to join in is most welcome to.  If you've not yet read Alice Munro, she's a really marvelous short story writer and her work is well worth exploring.