Chekhov on Lake Huron : FRIEND OF MY YOUTH <i> by Alice Munro (Alfred A. Knopf: $18.95; 277 pp.; 0-394-58442.2</i> )
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we--have children. Then they always want us to be the same, they want us to be parents--it shakes them up dreadfully if we should do anything they didn’t think we’d do. Dreadfully.”
The speaker is a widower named Austin Cobbett, the newly resigned minister of a church in a small Canadian town. He is about to do something that will shake up his kids. At 70, he plans to remarry and live in Hawaii, forsaking his pulpit and parsonage for a plump widow and a life on the beach. At the opening of the story, he is being outfitted for this new life, standing before the mirrors of Crawford’s Men’s Wear, checking himself out in a pair of sporty plaid pants.
“Listen to me,” Jerry Crawford says to him. “With the darker shirt and the lighter pants you can’t go wrong. It’s youthful.” Jerry wants to know when the “happy happy day” is.
In fact, there is to be no happy happy day for Austin. His young housekeeper, Karin, will see this first. His children won’t see it at all. He’ll never go to Hawaii. The wedding is a ruse, a complete fabrication, to cover the fact that he intends to go off alone, to retreat to the very edge of his life, to float mercifully free of others.
Austin Cobbett dies, a few weeks later, “in a boating accident on a lake nobody had ever heard him mention,” where he had quietly rented a cabin. Nothing about this event will seem accidental. Still, Karin wonders if Austin hadn’t figured out that she knew of his real intentions. Maybe he even wanted her to know. “No matter how alone you are,” she muses, “and how tricky and determined, don’t you need for one person to know?”
The answer is yes. But whether you find that person or not is another matter. And much of Alice Munro’s remarkable fiction has to do with precisely such a quest, to connect the “audible but solitary” lives of her characters.
“Friend of My Youth” is Munro’s sixth collection of short stories, preceded most recently by “The Progress of Love” and “The Moons of Jupiter.” She has written only one novel (“Lives of Girls and Women”), but her stories have the weight --the moral and temporal scope, the thematic concerns--of longer works.
Munro, in fact, is in a class of her own when it comes to the short story. No other writer working today is able to invest the humble story with more power, grace or breadth. Her distinctive sweep of time--usually several generations, or at least one lifetime--adds to the impression one has of a much larger work. A story begins by focusing on one character, only to open up windows onto contingent lives, and soon, a miniature universe is unfolding: Not one story--but several--are told simultaneously by shuttling fluidly back and forth through time.
Munro lives in Canada near Lake Huron. Her work is set against the cold, rural (or small-town) landscape typified by Austin Corbett’s village. Also typical is a character possessing Austin’s strong moral center, his tragic goodness and quiet wisdom: “You either trust or you don’t trust, in my opinion,” Austin tells Karin. “When you decide you’re going to trust, you have to start where you are.”
Her characters seem almost untouched by the leveling force of popular culture. No pop brand names here, no cheap-and-easy identifications. Often, characters don’t even belong to our time. The spinster, Meda Roth, in the story, “Meneseteung,” for instance, is a poet on the Canadian frontier in the 1880s, driven to madness by loss and loneliness and the discovery of the body of a battered woman outside her garden gate.
The woman is not dead, as Meda first thinks, but the event is no less chilling because of it. The failure of love, the pull of place and memory, the falling off of purpose, the panic typified by a bowl of grape juice overflowing drop by drop, staining the wooden floor while Meda’s sanity also oozes away, creates a haunting atmosphere.
“Goodness and Mercy” is a story with a quite different tone. Averill has taken her dying mother on a cruise to Europe, a scenario one normally would envision as tragic, but the story has hilarious moments, primarily offered up by the mother’s mordant wit. Yet, the ending is such a surprise--so eerie, dreamy, and mystical.
“Wigtime,” in contrast, is strange in another way, a twisting tale that follows two girls from a rural, snowbound childhood to a later reunion and the disclosure of a very odd form of blackmail.
How to convey the richness of this collection? Not by describing the content of each story, but by suggesting the beauty of the writing, the great depth of understanding, the maturity so evident in these stories. Munro has been compared by more than one critic to Chekhov, and for once this sort of claim doesn’t seem like hyperbole. She has the haunting lyricism and the indulgent wisdom to qualify.
From “Friend of My Youth”:
Robert came to work at Grieveses’ some months before the girls’ father died. They knew him already, from church. . . . Robert had come out from Scotland and was on his way west. He had stopped with relatives or people he knew, members of the scanty congregation. To earn some money, probably, he came to Grieveses’. Soon he and Flora were engaged. They could not go to dances or to card parties like other couples, but they went for long walks. The chaperone--unofficially--was Ellie. Ellie was then a wild tease, a long-haired, impudent, childish girl full of lolloping energy. She would run up hills and smite the mullein stalks with a stick, shouting and prancing and pretending to be a warrior on horseback. That, or the horse itself. This when she was fifteen, sixteen years old. Nobody but Flora could control her, and generally Flora just laughed at her, being too used to her to wonder if she was quite right in the head. They were wonderfully fond of each other. Ellie, with her long skinny body, her long pale face, was like a copy of Flora--the kind of copy you often see in families, in which because of some carelessness or exaggeration of features or coloring, the handsomeness of one person passes into the plainness--or almost plainness--of the other. But Ellie had no jealousy about this. She loved to comb out Flora’s hair and pin it up. They had great times, washing each other’s hair. Ellie would press her face into Flora’s throat, like a colt nuzzling its mother.
So when Robert laid claim to Flora, or Flora to him--nobody knew how it was--Ellie had to be included. She didn’t show any spite toward Robert, but she pursued and waylaid them on their walks; she sprung on them out of the bushes or sneaked up behind them so softly that she could blow on their necks. People saw her do it. And they heard of her jokes. She had always been terrible for jokes and sometimes it had got her into trouble with her father, but Flora had protected her. Now she put thistles in Robert’s bed. She set his place at the table with the knife and fork the wrong way around. She switched the milk pails to give him the old one with the hole in it. For Flora’s sake, maybe, Robert humored her. . . .
But in the winter a commotion started. There was Ellie, vomiting, weeping, running off and hiding in the haymow, howling when they found her and pulled her out, jumping to the barn floor, running around in circles, rolling in the snow. Ellie was deranged. Flora had to call the doctor. She told him that her sister’s periods had stopped--could the backup of blood be driving her wild? Robert had had to catch her and tie her up, and together he and Flora had put her to bed. She would not take food, just whipped her head from side to side, howling. It looked as if she would die speechless. But somehow the truth came out. Not from the doctor, who could not get close enough to examine her, with all her thrashing about. Probably, Robert confessed. Flora finally got wind of the truth, through all her high-mindedness. Now there had to be a wedding, though not the one that had been planned.