On Alice Munro

Amundsen

Alice Munro has said that mood is more important than what happens in her fiction, and she wastes no time suggesting the harshness of jilted love in the opening scene of “Amundsen.” A young woman named Vivien has come to this remote, frigid town with “air like ice… brittle-looking birch trees… [e]verything austere” to teach children who are infected with tuberculosis. Her own health is certainly at risk, but the greater danger is love—her first—that she is unknowingly going to encounter. It will lay bare her rawest place, like the raw meat she sees a woman holding between her knees at the train station, and it will strip Vivien of any protection, just as cold and wind and ice strip the earth to its most brutal forms. The land’s beauty—“So immense an enchantment”—seems out of a Russian novel, but it is never again the same for her after that first look. Much like the birch trees that appear white from a distance but up close are “grayish yellow, grayish blue, gray,” the color of bruises, whatever she has imagined of romance will be altogether different from her experience.

Munro dispenses with the clichéd metaphor of a broken heart when Alister, the jilter, tosses the red-heart cookies out the window for the birds to eat. Instead, Munro likens the grievous end of a romantic relationship to the stripping of flesh. Vivien’s last name is Hyde and, upon meeting her, the young girl Mary jokes: “Tan your hide.” Later Alister is said to be quite good at “tearing a strip off” a person, in an emotional way; professionally he’s a surgeon. He doesn’t operate on Vivien as he does other patients, but his attention on her (one can hardly call it wooing), their subsequent bedding, his statement of intent to marry, and his severance of that pledge knock the breath out of her as if he’d opened her up and removed her lungs, as he’s rumored to do to others. After he has “unpromised” the marriage, Vivien says, “Every turn is like a shearing off of what’s left of my life.” Alister refers to himself by that grisly nickname, “sawbones,” an image devoid of skin and flesh, and that’s how he envisions a union: “a bare-bones wedding.”

But there will be no ceremony. In the end, Alister leaves Vivien in a “special ladies’ waiting room.” Historically and still in many parts of the world, a woman’s peculiar state is to wait to be courted, and the theme of waiting pervades the story. In the first scene Vivien waits for the train to start, and the train is waiting to be filled with people; but what she is really waiting for is love to jumpstart her life. Alister instructs Vivien to wait in a separate room while he cooks dinner for them on their first date. The children with tuberculosis are waiting for something to happen too—to be cured or to die—and all the people in the story are waiting for the war to be over. 

I wonder what we can make of Alister’s relationships that occur off the page, including with Mary and her mother. There’s no mention of Mary’s father, which opens up a possibility of romance between Alister and Mary’s mother, perhaps unrequited. Alister is able to talk Mary’s mother into allowing Mary to spend time with a girl dying of TB, which is no small feat. And then there’s that hefty line, “That’s if you’re going to live your life for Mary,” as if this is a prospect Alister has considered and refused. Of course, Munro doesn’t intend for us to know the extent of these relationships, only what’s on the page, but she has interestingly created plausibility. Clearly Mary suffers some kind of rejection from Alister—they no longer have the relationship they once did. She has also romanticized him (like Vivien has) to the point of giving him a name, Reddy Fox, out of a book. Mary’s mother, who runs the kitchen and knows when Vivien doesn’t show up for meals, might have been the one to start the gossip about Vivien and Alister. Later, this difficulty of eating meals is Alister’s excuse for not seeing Vivien before the wedding. Perhaps he is trying to spare someone else pain. Then there’s the dead girl, Anabel (think of Poe’s Annabel Lee). It’s worth mentioning that tuberculosis, the disease that these characters are at risk of contracting, was known as the “romantic disease” during the 19th century. The secondhand scenes of Alister with Mary and Anabel—teaching the girl to swim, their sledding as a group—are in blunt contrast to any other real-time view that Vivien has of him; I can hardly imagine such tenderness on Alister’s part. Did Anabel’s death function as way to shear off the rest of his life?

Munro is at her finest with the breakup scene, foregoing the deadened words most often used to describe the ending of a relationship to focus on the objective correlative of the “Skates Sharpened” sign and the moment of devastation that will stay with Vivien forever, when she hears his voice change. Even though what he tells her is terrible, “his voice had pain in [it]…he spoke out of that same deep place then, that he spoke from when he was in bed with me. But it is not so now, after he has spoken to another man.” Now his voice is “jaunty,” relief seeping out of it. This is another traceable theme, the dichotomy between women and the “world of men.” 

Other names in the story are worthy of notice, including Amundsen. I can find no such Canadian town, though west of Victoria Island there is an Amundsen Gulf, named for its famous explorer, Roald Amundsen. And there’s Alister’s last name, Fox. During their first meeting Vivien thinks he is “evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.” Had he actually proposed to her, perhaps she might have recalled this intuition and turned him down. But Dr. Fox—how slyly!—poses no such question. He merely says, “I do intend to marry you.” That she never decides to marry him is no different than her falling in love. Which of us decides to do that?

At the end of the story, many years later, Vivien is married to someone else but in the middle of a “dragged-out row.” Her last words are: “Nothing changes really about love.” It seems that in first love—and love thereafter—we are all explorers, willing to travel to inhospitable lands, and no matter how smart we are, how thorough our planning, love snares us, and flays us, every time. 

Read Amundsen in the New Yorker here.

Post and Beam

In “Post and Beam,” Alice Munro explores how women’s lives are circumscribed or “bound” by duty in a way that men’s lives are not. One of the first inklings of this is when Lionel recounts to Brendan, his former math teacher, and Brendan’s young housewife, Lorna, how he confused the words “mommy” and “mummy” as a child.* Only Brendan thinks this is amusing. In the introit, we read about Lionel’s dying mother, who’s much older than Lorna. It seems she has lived long enough to know precisely her ultimate limit—the time of her death. In the story that follows we see Lorna just starting out, brushing against the boundaries of her role as mother and wife and, as Lionel’s mother already knows, discovering that men are exempt from such holds, free to live manifold lives.

Lorna is doubly bound in this story, to her family of origin and to her husband and two young children. The strength of these ties becomes clear when she describes how she cried all through her wedding because “everything at home suddenly seemed so precious to her.” In the story’s current action she is obligated to accept her cousin Polly into their home for an extended visit. And in a scene with Polly: “…[S]he could not help feeling that Polly was hammering at her, trying to bring her to some capitulation, wrap her up in some intimate misery. And she was bound that she would not give in.” Later, at a friend’s wedding, Lorna gets drunk, “amazed at how easy it was, with alcohol, to get loose from the bondage of her spirits.”

Lionel, who’s unmarried, lets on early in the story that he isn’t keen on wives, or “ordinary anxieties,” with which domestic life is replete. He is bound-less; he seems preternaturally unattached, and his attractions are only to women who cannot make demands on him. Lorna is married and Polly will never leave her family. Polly isn’t enthusiastic about husbands either; we learn that she might have a marriage proposal back home that she’ll likely refuse. But Polly is bound another way, to her mother, grandmother and uncle. “I’d feel too guilty leaving them,” she says. In one scene, Lorna sees Polly in bed, “with the sheet pulled up around her like a shroud.” While Polly may feel harshly the limits of her life, whatever eventually breaks her heart would have nothing to do with men, Lorna thinks. Even the title words, post and beam, are things to hang from, or tie to. In fact, when Lorna imagines Polly’s suicide, it’s death by hanging.

When Lorna visits Lionel’s room, we discover what she really wants: to stay in the room “where there was nobody who knew her or wanted a thing from her.” Lionel’s room is a shell, a container, holding nothing—just as he can hardly hold any memories. Out of the “extraordinary bareness of his room… might come such altered versions of himself, created with no effort in the blink of an eye.” He is free in a way that Lorna isn’t, and Lorna knows that whether he takes up with Polly doesn’t matter; he will keep changing, maybe even love another woman. In Munro’s world, that is the privilege of men. 

Both women dream of this change, the kind Lionel can experience. Polly has “no hope of the change she must have dreamed was coming in her life.” And Lorna, in the end, now sees clearly that “she was counting on something happening, something that would change her life. She had accepted her marriage as one big change, but not as the last one.” The story ends on what must sound to Lorna like an almost chilling echo and demand: “Mommy. Mommy. Come here.” 

*This scene is from the story included in Munro’s collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, not in the version published in The New Yorker.

Read Post and Beam in the New Yorker here.