In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews

by Joyce Carol Oates

  What I was trying to explore [in an anthropological study titled Idols and Idiots] was the attitude of people in various cultures—one does not dare say the word “primitive” to describe such cultures—the attitude towards people who are mentally or physically unique. The words “deficient,” “handicapped,” “retarded,” being of course consigned to the dustbin and probably for good reason—not simply because such words may indicate a superior attitude and habitual unkindness but because they are not truly descriptive. Those words push aside a good deal that is remarkable, even awesome—or at any rate powerful, in such people. And what was interesting was to discover a certain amount of veneration as well as persecution, and the ascribing—not entirely inaccurately—of quite a range of abilities, seen as sacred, magical, dangerous, or valuable. [ “Child’s Play”]

  The fear of—the revulsion for—what is “awesome” in a retarded neighborhood girl whom the narrator knew when they were children, is the subject of the ironically titled “Child’s Play” at the outset of the story the reader is primed to expect a nostalgic look back at the protagonist’s United Church of Canada background in and near Guelph, Ontario, and her intensely close friendship with a girl named Charlene, but this expectation is revealed as naive:

  Charlene and I kept our eyes on each other, rather than looking down at what our hands were doing. Her eyes were wide and gleeful, as I suppose mine were, too. I don’t think we felt wicked, triumphing in our wickedness. More as if we were doing just what was—amazingly—demanded of us, as if this were the absolute high point, the culmination, in our lives, of our being ourselves. [ “Child’s Play”]

  In this case “ourselves” is the very expression of the girls’ cultural heritage—a deep suspicion of people who seem to deviate from the norm, who threaten the protocol of narrow domesticity. The “wicked” girls grow into—not “wicked” adults—but, simply, their elders. One will seek—belatedly—absolution; the other, the self-condemning yet self-sparing narrator, one of Munro’s intelligent witnesses, quite decisively eludes it:

  Was I not tempted, during all this palaver? Not once? You’d think that I might break open, be wise to break open, glimpsing that vast though tricky forgiveness. But no. It’s not for me. What’s done is done. Flocks of angels, tears of blood, not withstanding. [ “Child’s Play”]

  Like Flannery O’Connor, whose fiction, for all its surface dissimilarity, has been a powerful influence on Munro’s, Munro tracks her characters in their search for “forgiveness”—or grace. Where O’Connor’s vision is otherworldly, and “grace” is a gift of God, Munro’s vision is steadfastly secular; her characters lack any impulse toward transcendence, however desperate their situations; their lives are not susceptible to sharp, defined moments of redemption but to more mundane acts of human love, magnanimity, charity. In “Wood,” for instance, in this new collection, a somewhat eccentric, crankily independent furniture refinisher is drawn to the forest to cut wood, an interest, or obsession “which is private but not secret.” Suffering a fall in the woods, Roy can barely drag himself back to his truck—“He can’t believe the pain. He can’t believe that it would continue so, could continue to defeat him”—his plight is so extreme, he’s being tracked by a buzzard—when, unexpectedly, his wife, who has been near-paralyzed with chronic depression, comes to his rescue: “She came in the car, she says—she speaks as if she’d never given up driving at all—she came in the car but she left it back at the road.” In a moment, Roy’s terrible predicament is eased; he has not been lost in a “deserted forest,” as he’d believed, but has been saved—redeemed—by his wife; as his wife, too, in being obliged to rescue her husband, has been awakened from her spell of depression: “To his knowledge, she has never driven the truck before. It’s remarkable the way she manages it.” “Wood” comes to a plausibly happy ending, where the reader has been primed to expect something very different, as in one of Jack London’s gleefully grim little allegories of men succumbing to the wild.

  So too, the first story in the volume, “Dimensions,” charts the progress of a woman who has remained married, unwisely, to a mentally unstable, abusive husband: “…it was no use contradicting [Lloyd]. Perhaps men just have to have enemies, the way they have to have their jokes.” Even after their children are murdered by Lloyd, and Lloyd has been declared criminally insane and hospitalized, Doree can’t quite bring herself to separate from him; like Lloyd, she wants to think that the children are in some sort of “heaven”—“It was the idea that the children were in what [Lloyd] called their Dimension that came sneaking up on her…and for the first time brought a light feeling to her, not pain.” In another unexpected conclusion, Doree is abruptly freed of her morbid dependence upon her ex-husband by way of a spontaneous act of her own when she saves the life of an accident victim by giving him artificial respiration:

  Then she felt it for sure. A breath out of the boy’s mouth. She spread her hand on the skin of his chest and at first she could not tell if it was rising and falling because of her own trembling.

  Yes. Yes.

  It was a true breath. The airway was open. He was breathing on his own. He was breathing. [“Dimensions”]

  In the similarly poignant “Deep-Holes,” in the new volume, a woman must acknowledge the painful fact that her adult son is lost to her, for all her effort to reclaim him; he has vanished from her life only to resurface as a guru of sorts to homeless and disfigured individuals in a Toronto slum, for whom “normal” relations with his family are repugnant. Bluntly he tells her:

  “I’m not saying I love you…I don’t use stupid language…I don’t usually try to get anywhere talking to people. I usually try to avoid personal relationships. I mean I do. I do avoid them.”

  For Sally’s son there is no spiritual dimension—“There isn’t any inside stuff…There is only outside, what you do, every moment of your life. Since I realized this I’ve been happy.” Rebuffed, dismissed, the guru’s mother comes finally to feel a kinship with others like herself. Her victories will be small ones, but attainable:

  There is something, anyway, in having got through the day without its being an absolute disaster. It wasn’t, was it?…

  And it was possible, too, that age could be her ally, turning her into somebody she didn’t know yet. She has seen the look on the faces of certain old people—marooned on islands of their own choosing, clear sighted, content.

  The story in Too Much Happiness most clearly derived from Flannery O’Connor is the oddly titled “Free Radicals” in which a boy with a “long and rubbery” face—“a jokey look”—inveigles his way into the home of an elderly widow who lives alone, under the pretense of being from the electric company; then, he claims to be a diabetic, who needs quick nourishment; at last, in a TV-psychotic monologue he reveals that he’s a murderer—he has killed his family—“I take out my nice little gun and bin-bang-bam I shoot the works of them.” The terrified woman whose house he has entered in the hope of stealing her car—herself in remission from cancer—contrives to save her life by humoring the boy, and by telling him a story of how years before she’d poisoned a girl to whom her husband was attracted; the story isn’t true, and doesn’t seem to make much difference to the psychotic boy, but seems to be revelatory of Nita’s own guilt for having stolen another woman’s husband when she was young. After the boy has fled with her car, Nita comes to the belated realization that she hasn’t really grieved for her husband until now: “Rich. Rich. Now she knows what it is to really miss him. Like the air sucked out of the sky.” It’s a curious story, an ungainly amalgam of O’Connor and Munro, intriguing rather than satisfying, ending with Nita being informed by a police officer that the murderous boy died crashing her car: “Killed. Instantly. Serves him right.” It’s often said that Munro’s short stories, richly detailed and dense with psychological observation, read like compact novels, but “Free Radicals,” like one or two others in this collection, rather more suggest the thinness of anecdote.

  Th
e jewel of Too Much Happiness is the title story, an ambitiously imagined and exquisitely structured novella-length work in the mode of Munro’s longer, intricately structured stories “The Love of a Good Woman,” “Carried Away” and “The Albanian Virgin,” as well as the linked stories of The View from Castle Rock (2006). In the Russian mathematician/ novelist Sophia Kovalevsky (1850–1891)—the first woman to be appointed to a university teaching position in North Europe—Munro has discovered one of her most compelling and sympathetic young-woman protagonists, in temperament closely akin to such earlier Munro heroines as Rose of The Beggar Maid of whom it’s said “[her] nature was growing like a prickly pineapple, but slowly, and secretly, hard pride and skepticism overlapping, to make something surprising even to herself.” As Sophia Kovalevsky is eventually doomed by her very independence, physically exhausted and made ill by having to undertake an arduous winter train-journey alone, so Rose is made to feel miserably out of place in her provincial Ontario town of Hanratty; though Rose is never in any physical danger, the threat to her sense of her self-worth is ceaseless through childhood and adolescence, a continual questioning by her elders of the integrity of her very nature. The final story of The Beggar Maid is titled “Who Do You Think You Are?”—this terrible, taunting, and corrosive question put to independent-minded young women, often by older women who should be their mentors and supporters, like Rose’s high school English teacher, who maddeningly persists in demanding that Rose follow every insipid rule of her classroom. With the authority of the repressive Protestant community behind her Miss Hattie persecutes Rose as if Rose were a young disobedient child instead of an intellectually gifted high school girl: “You can’t go thinking you are better than other people just because you can learn poems. Who do you think you are?” Though inwardly raging Rose reacts in the way that, the reader guesses, Alice Munro herself reacted, as a bright high school girl in the small Ontario town of Wingham, in the 1940s:

  This was not the first time in her life Rose had been asked who she thought she was; in fact that question had often struck her like a monotonous gong and she paid no attention to it. But she understood, afterward, that Miss Hattie was not a sadistic teacher…. And she was not vindictive; she was not taking revenge because she believed Rose had been proved wrong. The lesson she was trying to teach here was more important to her than any poem, and one she truly believed Rose needed. It seemed that many other people believed she needed it, too.

  Of course Sophia Kovalevsky lives in a yet more provincial and restrictive world than rural southwestern Ontario, at least when she resides in her native Russia where unmarried women are not allowed to travel out of the country without permission from their families. In the cause of female emancipation Sophia marries a young radical-minded man without loving him, in order to leave the country to study abroad; after his death, by suicide, she is left with their young daughter, and the challenge of establishing a career. In 1888, Sophia wins first prize in an international mathematics competition in which entries are blind and genderless. At the swanky reception for the Bordin Prize in Paris

  [Sophia] herself was taken in by it at first, dazzled by all the chandeliers and champagne. The compliments quite dizzying, the marveling and the hand-kissing spread thick on top of certain inconvenient but immutable facts. The fact that they would never grant her a job worthy of her gift, that she would be lucky indeed to find herself teaching in a provincial girls’ high school…[“Too Much Happiness”]

  No more would the gentlemen-mathematicians who so honor Sophia give her a university position than they would employ a “learned chimpanzee.” Like the smug, self-righteous women of provincial Ontario the wives of the great scientists “preferred not to meet her, or invite her into their homes.” Most painful of all, Sophia loses—at least provisionally—the man who is the great love of her life, a professor of sociology and law, a Liberal forbidden to hold an academic post in Russia, named Maxsim Maxsimovich Kovalevsky. (It’s a coincidence that their last names are identical—Sophia’s first husband was a distant cousin of Maxsim.)

  Sophia’s adoration of Maxsim both illuminates her life as a woman and endangers it. The reader senses, beyond the young woman’s fantasies of domestic life with this most unusual man—“He weighs 285 pounds, distributed over a large frame, and being Russian, he is often referred to as a bear, also as a Cossack”—that Maxsim isn’t nearly so infatuated with Sophia as she is with him. Both are forty years old, but Sophia is the more mature of the two, as she is the more vulnerable emotionally. Maxsim can’t seem to forgive Sophia for being at least as brilliant as he is, if not, with her “freaky glittery fame” more of a prodigy. Where Sophia writes of Maxsim with girlish adoration—

  He is very joyful, at the same time very gloomy

  Disagreeable neighbor, excellent comrade

  Extremely light-minded yet very affectionate

  Indignantly naïve nevertheless very blasé

  Terribly sincere and at the same time very sly—

  Maxsim includes in his love letters “terrible” sentences:

  If I loved you I would have written differently.

  It would seem that Sophia’s fortunes take a turn for the better when she’s offered a position to teach in Sweden—“the only people in Europe willing to hire a female mathematician for their new university.” But to travel by herself from Berlin to Stockholm in the winter, at a time when Copenhagan is under quarantine with an outbreak of smallpox, is a dangerous, if not foolhardy undertaking: “Would Maxsim ever in his life board such a train as this?” By the time Sophia finally arrives in Stockholm she is ravaged by pneumonia and never regains consciousness. Speaking at her funeral, Maxsim refers to her “rather as if she had been a professor of his acquaintance” and not his lover. It’s a melancholy end to this vibrant and accomplished “emancipated” woman who lived before her time, bravely and without the protection of men.

  “Too Much Happiness” gathers considerable narrative momentum in its final pages, which chart poor Sophia’s fatal train to the only country in Europe—if not the world—that will hire her as a university professor. Like those long, elaborately researched and documented stories of Andrea Barrett that chronicle the lives of nineteenth-century scientists—see Ship Fever (1996) and Servants of the Map (2002)—“Too Much Happiness” contains enough densely packed material for several novels and is burdened at times by expository material presented in undramatic and somewhat improbable passages, as if the author were eager to establish her subject as real, historical and not merely imagined:

  Suppose this girl had been awake and Sophia had said to her, “Forgive me, I was dreaming of 1870. I was there, in Paris, my sister was in love with a Communard. He was captured and he might have been shot or sent to New Caledonia but we were able to get him away. My husband did it. My husband Vladimir who was not a Communard at all but only wanted to look at the fossils in the Jardin des Plantes.”

  In her acknowledgments Munro notes that parts of “Too Much Happiness” are derived from translated Russian texts including excerpts from Sophia’s diaries, letters, and other writings, and that her primary source is Nina and Don H. Kennedy’s biography Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky (1983), a work that “enthralled” her. Sophia Kovalevsky is indeed an enthralling figure, the single most interesting individual Munro has written about to date. It’s appropriate that Munro prefaces “Too Much Happiness” with a remark by the historic Sophia Kovalevsky:

  Many persons who have not studied mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science. Actually, however, this science requires great fantasy.

  III.

  NOSTALGIAS

  NOSTALGIA 1970: CITY ON FIRE

  “Almost pathetically serious”—so it was said of the thirty-two-year-old novelist whose photograph appeared in Vogue’s “People Are Talking About” feature for September 1970. The caption writer went on to note that the writer whose third novel them had received the National Book Award
for 1970 was “tentative, hush-voiced, with the fixed brown eyes of a sleepwalker” and that “daydreaming” had given to her writing a “peculiarly floating quality” somewhat at odds with the violence of her subject. I was quoted, with enigmatic brevity: “What an artist has to resist and turn to his advantage is violence.” This replica of my face of 1970, so strangely without expression, mask-like and dreamy and “serene” was, ironically, no indication of the maelstrom of emotions I was feeling at the time: excitement, wonderment, stress, a kind of chronic ontological anxiety. (“Ontological anxiety”: the doubt that one exists as merely one, and the doubt that one can know the identity of this one, in any case. “Ontological anxiety” is an invaluable stimulus for creative endeavor since, in such endeavors, though we may have grave doubts about our own existence, we are likely to throw ourselves passionately into the construction of artworks with which to bond with others.)

  Photographed for Vogue! The most elegant, as it was the most daunting and mysterious of the glossy magazines my grandmother, herself a somewhat mysterious woman, brought to our farmhouse in Millersport, New York, while I was growing up in the 1950s. Other magazines were the more populist, practical-minded Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping; the career-girl Mademoiselle (where, in 1959, my first published story would appear as a co-winner of that magazine’s short story competition); and The New Yorker, most prized in our household for its cartoons, often as perplexing as they were funny, and inhabited by fey, epicene individuals we assumed were New York sophisticates. By far, it was Vogue that evoked the most fascination to a girl living on a small, not-very-prosperous farm in the upstate New York region known as the Snow Belt. Here was a treasure trove of the mystical, magically empowered Feminine, distinct from the merely utilitarian Female (on a farm, female creatures have their specific uses, none of which is romantic in the slightest): Vogue was, among other things, a shrine honoring sheer, nonutilitarian Beauty, most of which happened to be Feminine. It would be decades before I encountered Sigmund Freud’s remark in his late, melancholy Civilization and Its Discontents: “Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.” Yet I was, in early adolescence, an astute observer of worlds so foreign to my own, images of beauty so remote from my experience, I might have been contemplating photographs of men and women from a species other than my own captured by the camera lenses of such legendary photographers as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. No more than I might have fantasized looking like any of these celebrities, socialites and models, wearing such extraordinary clothes, jewelry, makeup, could I have imagined seeing myself one day in Vogue, or the image of one identified in a caption as “Joyce Carol Oates.” As my childhood heroine Alice, of Alice in Wonderland, exclaimed: “Curiouser and curiouser!”