Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

When Neal was around other people, even one person other than Jinny, his behavior changed, becoming more animated, enthusiastic, ingratiating. Jinny was not bothered by that anymore – they had been together for twenty-one years. And she herself changed – as a reaction, she used to think – becoming more reserved and slightly ironic. Some masquerades were necessary, or just too habitual to be dropped.

“En la vida tienes unos cuantos sitios, o quizá uno solo, donde ocurrió algo; y después están todos los demás sitios.”

He came to see them in the evenings, when the children were in bed. The slight intrusions of domestic life—the cry of the baby reaching them through an open window, the scolding Brendan sometimes had to give Lorna about toys left lying on the grass, instead of being put back in the sandbox, the call from the kitchen asking if she had remembered to buy limes for the gin and tonic—all seemed to cause a shiver, a tightening of Lionel's tall, narrow body and intent, distrustful face.

Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives.

Alas, I reached the end of the book and felt nothing but relief--relief that it was over. Munro is a lovely writer, with a good command of language, but her choice of subject matter, story development, and characters was uninspiring. With a title like "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," I expected at least a little bit of drama or intrigue. Or, if Munro left out suspense, then I expected at least a few stories to make me feel something: anger or sadness or indignation. Instead, what I felt--if anything--was melancholy. But really, I mostly felt bored and restless to "get on with it."

This summary by one Amazon reviewer gives my impression of the book to a T: "To be fair, I admit [Munro] is a good writer, technically speaking. It's just that she doesn't write about anything interesting. . . . Quick story rundown: a married lady has cancer, urinates in someone's driveway, then kisses their son. The end. Yay, that was neat."

Non pensai alla storia che avrei scritto su Alfrida - non a quella in particolare - ma al lavoro a cui volevo dedicarmii, più simile a una mano che acciuffi qualcosa nell'aria che alla costruzione di storie

Hateship, etc. . .

And yet—an excitement. The unspeakable excitement you feel when a galloping disaster promises to release you from all responsibility for your own life. Then for shame you must compose yourself and stay very quiet.

 Alice Munro, then.

 it seems to me that I come closest to becoming myself as I would rather be when I read her stories. I don't wish to be one of her men, or women. I don't wish to know them. There wouldn't be much to it, really. Literary characters of the highest order are rather absurd, in real life. In the actual life. They're rather common, rather like all other people, to be much. It's not that, that I'm talking about. It's the beautiful unfurling of character, character in the personal sense, you know, character as in personality. It is as when you meet a person. First a stranger, and after many a day dies the strangeness. A familiarity is born, dislike, love, friendship, love.

 but you can say as much about, say, Faulkner's people. Or Shakespeare's, for good measure. It's not that, really. When I read Shakespeare, I don't wish to write like him. That would be rather silly, really. Only Shakespeare could write so, in my opinion. The facts support me. I only wish to remember the words, to utter them to myself, utilise them in the culture of my soul, but not, ever, to write like him, or even think like him, at all. And Faulkner too. These are all very good gentlemen, cerebral and jovial, superfluous in a way, in their casual genius. You read Faulkner too much and you start to feel that he's not so great, really. But so we feel about the world. It isn't such a great thing, nothing much. But pause a moment, and everything, the cricket's song, the buzz of that car out there in the night, the colour of my tea that's just how tea ought to look—everything becomes a miracle.

 you become too used to it to see that it's really unlike anything you could have guessed, before you saw it. But how strong is the usurping power of the view! You see the world and it's stamped forever in your memory, it will always be, once you've beheld it. It's a strange affair, and profound, beholding is.

 yet there isn't much in Munro's stories to behold. Only yesterday I wrestled with rather than read the last story in this the strangest named book of hers. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” There isn't the spectacle of prose and poetry coming together here as one witnesses in the amazing writers of past and present. Not like D. H. Lawrence, whose stories are always comic, or O'Connor, whose stories are always somewhat absurd, somewhat weird. In Munro, things happen much as they do or would in real life. Perhaps this is what is meant by naturalism, I wouldn't really know. Maybe this is realism. I hate to define that which I greatly love. Definitions greatly reduce, condensing everything into a bottle. Even Shakespeare to me is not an Elizabethan playwright. He is just Shakespeare. You don't want to tell me that Munro is anything but just that, Alice Munro, born 1932. There is no reducing her to schools and modes. For when you have read one of her stories, and they're all pretty much readable, you feel at the end a strangeness that is ineffable and profound. Like coming to the end of a novel, but without the exhaustion of having toiled too long at it. It is perhaps why I have never read more than just a story in a day, with Munro. It's mostly out of laziness, of course, but there's also the subtle difficulty of getting into the story, and the lingering strangeness of the previously read one. Munro's stories aren't easy, at all. They're not convoluted, really, they're just vast, like life. They're generous and steady, neither hurrying to the end nor dwelling reluctantly on descriptions. So very few things to underline, so little worth remembering, for quotation. For Munro is all about the life itself, not the other stuff. There's almost an incredible pragmatism to her, as if she can't stand adornments. Like one of her characters who insists on being practical, yet she isn't so rigid, as all that. The triumph of Alice Munro is that she appears to have no style, and the stories appear to tell themselves, as if she never was. That is what gives her so much style, for she appears to have no time for it. She isn't showing off, she appears not to be showing off, yet she's so good, and that's why she's better than most who do this kind of thing. In the end each story in itself is to be reread, for there's always something to be missed in them, something first overlooked, and worth returning to.