Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

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, and so quickly.  How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives.  How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, as well as about the jobs that had to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century.  It was the women, then, who could slip back--during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of the children--into a kind of second adolescence.  A lightening of spirits when the husbands departed.  Dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits that were a throwback to high school, mushrooming between the walls that the husband was paying for, in the hours when he wasn't there.

The first and title story of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, a collection for which, no matter how hard you try, you'll never remember how the title words are ordered, is uncharacteristically optimistic.  I don't mean to say that Munro's stories are bleak or sad, but they are honest about the realities of fortune; adulterers and new spouses take big gambles on happiness, which pay off incompletely, if at all, but the chance of illness and disease are surer bets.  "Hateship" is a story in which fortune works out with almost comic grace: a pair of young girls play a cruel trick on their housekeeper, writing letters as if they are a distant acquaintance, claiming to be head over heels in love with her.  When the housekeeper throws caution to the wind, quits her job, and climbs upon a train to Saskatchewan with an entire trousseau packed away in the next car, we expect disaster.  But when she arrives she finds her "beau" catastrophically ill with fever, and once she's nursed him back to health, he's wise enough not to question why or how she arrived.

It's a charming story, and intriguingly structured: Munro follows one point-of-view character at a time, "handing off" the story to the next when they are encountered in the narrative, from the trainyard clerk to the housekeeper to the girls to their father, and so on.  It's a method that seems cribbed from film, which is funny, because few short story writers seem as cinematic as Munro.  The other stories have few surprises--beyond the surprises of life that Munro relishes, I mean--and for the first time I felt a dim sense that these stories were deeply familiar.  Something of the freshness of Munro has worn away for me, replaced by a very different sensation, that of settling into something friendly and familiar--an old worn armchair feeling.

Many of her usual themes are evident here.  There are fewer bad men than usual, but there is Mr. Vorguilla in "Queenie," a demanding and cruel old widower who whisks the narrator's young half sister away to Toronto in a misbegotten marriage.  Adultery is all over the place, from the imagined ("Post and Beam") to the brief and epiphany-like ("Floating Bridge," "What is Remembered," "Nettles") to sustained and life-altering ("Queenie," "Comfort," "The Bear Came Over the Mountain").  There's lots of illness and death: in "Comfort," Munro invents a hardcore atheist schoolteacher, Lewis, who is dying of ALS.  He's a prig and a boor, but his values are sincere and deeply held, not unlike Del's mother in The Lives of Girls and Women, and his wife struggles with how to honor her husband's skepticism at the end of his life, when the idea of his immortal soul would be of great comfort.  In "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," maybe the collection's best story and one of Munro's most anthologized works, Grant places his wife of fifty years, Fiona, in a nursing home because she is suffering from Alzheimer's.  When he visits, she seems only to dimly remember him, and yet he has to watch as she forms an intense bond, even a love, for another patient.

Another story, "Family Furnishings," tells of an eccentric old aunt, estranged from the narrator, who learns only late in life that her aunt was deeply offended by the way the narrator seized on a stray remark of hers and used it in her fiction.  Like "Material," one of my favorite stories of Munro's, it deals with the ethical question of using real life people in our writing: real life, of course, being the only resource we have, and yet even though the aunt's words have been totally recontextualized, something essential has been betrayed.  More than any of the stories here, I wondered if "Family Furnishings" was drawn from an experience in Munro's own life.  Is it permissible to use other people in our stories?  We already do, Munro answers, all the time, in the kind of narratives we construct around our lives, which always serve ourselves more than those who are supporting characters; in our memory we tell stories that real people--like Fiona, for example--will always betray.  That's a sure bet as anything.  But like in the title story, sometimes the stories we tell have a way of coming true.