See What Can Be Done

by Lorrie Moore

  Welty would not have been thrilled with any biography—and even for an authorized biographer her desire to “retain an inner self that is a ‘deep black hiding place’ ” makes her a difficult subject. She was not brave politically—she was suspicious of groupthink of any sort, whether it contained southern benightedness or northern sanctimoniousness—and in the essay “Must the Writer Crusade?” the exasperated title speaks for itself. She dismissed feminism as “noisiness,” and once, when asked whether she’d been brought up to believe a woman’s place was in the home, she replied, “I don’t think I was ever told where it was.” She felt she was already writing about injustice of various kinds; she voted Democratic: that should be enough. Any whiff of Yankee bias irked her, and she was rightly suspicious of the literary term regionalism, though her friend V. S. Pritchett in a review of The Ponder Heart defended the traditions of regional writing, saying, “They are a protest by old communities, enriched by wounds, against the success of mass, or polyglot culture.” Even in her own work, moreover, Welty wrote, “How did it leave us—the old, safe, slow way people used to know of learning how one another feels?” This from the point of view of a northern character having lunch at Galatoire’s. (In the very same story, southernness is seen as the less naïve stance: a look, a mask of “life-is-a-dream irony, which could turn to pure challenge at the drop of a hat.”)

  In letters Welty wrote, especially toward the end of her life, she said she often dreamed in galley proofs, and the struggle of the dream consisted of trying to make corrections on the type. She wrote at a desk with her back to the window, the quiet cruise and trespass of tourists insufficiently obscured outside. If her life had fallen into a trap or two, well, the world is full of traps of all sorts and one can find some writer or other in each and every one of them. Literary biography is like detective fiction for those who don’t need suspense.

  (2006)

  Alice Munro’s The Moons of Jupiter

  Jupiter was the first planet studied by Galileo, in whose telescope were discovered Jupiter’s four largest moons as well. Now there are over sixty known moons whose presences have revealed themselves (like Alice Munro’s work, shyly opening up over the years), but these first four moons are referred to as the Galilean ones, and they are named after mortals favored by the great god Jupiter—Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—whose lives are forever altered by the god’s love. The mortals are all feminine in their charms, if not entirely female, and in terms of whether love is fortunate for them or not (or even merely benign), they are batting close to .500, a figure that is beyond excellent in baseball but dicier in other realms. Io, the victim of both love and jealousy, is turned into a starving, wandering heifer stung mad by a gadfly sent by Jupiter’s jealous wife. Europa is abducted to Crete (by Jupiter in the guise of a bull), and without too much extraordinary suffering she bears his royal children. Ganymede, a handsome young prince who catches Jupiter’s fancy, is delivered to Olympus by an eagle in order to become a sort of sommelier to the gods. Callisto, another victim of sexual jealousy, is turned into a bear then mercifully placed among the stars to avoid being shot by her own son.

  In so many tales told of romantic love, beauty casts spells that are often greeted or countered by other spells. In myth Jupiter’s moons have lives of deformity and transplant, and in science the moons themselves are known for their erratic orbits. How like the characters of Alice Munro. Though her protagonists are not explicitly turned into animals or cupbearers or loved by any actual omnipotent, tempestuous god, the wanderings, transformations, mischief, and anguish of possessive love—the kind of love everyone really values, “the one nobody wants to have missed out on,” according to the narrator of “Hard-Luck Stories”—are her most abiding subjects. Like the ancient Greeks, Alice Munro has always known this is where the stories are. Fate, power (gender and class), human nature (mortal strength and divine frailty) all show up there to be negotiated and expressed.

  “Life would be grand if it weren’t for the people,” says a Munro character in “Labor Day Dinner,” who also offers up the line perhaps most often quoted from this collection, that “love is not kind or honest and does not contribute to happiness in any reliable way.” It is an acerbic balance to the alkaline lilt of 1 Corinthians 13:4, also quoted in this story, which informs us that “Love suffereth long, and is kind.” That both ideas can be held simultaneously within the same narrative universe is part of the reason Munro’s work endures—its wholeness of vision, its complexity of feeling, its tolerance of mind. For the storyteller, the failure of love is irresistible in its drama, as is its brief, happy madness, its comforts and vain griefs. And no one has brought greater depth of concentration and notice to the subject than Munro. No one has saturated her work with such startling physical observation and psychological insight. “He knew he had an advantage,” she writes in “Connection,” the book’s inaugural story, “and we had reached the point in our marriage where no advantage was given up easily.” And in the final story: “You touch a man that way to remind him that you are grateful….It made me feel older than grandchildren would to see my daughter touch a man—a boy—this way. I felt her sad jitters, could predict her supple attentions.”

  The style in which people circle one another, their mix of lunacy and hard intelligence, the manner in which our various pasts revolve simultaneously around the present, the way that children are always in a parent’s gravitational pull, even when out of sight, the fact that filial love has an infinitude of stories: all these are signaled by the book’s title and in the title story. “I found my father in the heart wing,” it begins, and the very many things it can mean to be a daughter are echoed through three generations gathered in that wing. Munro brings both a warm eye and a cool eye to the project of loss: “I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive.”

  Survival is often the hilarious miracle of Munro’s world. The harsh and mythic Canadian frontier has changed; it has found some retaliatory energy, encroached upon the home and riven it—in changing social times making a frontier of family life. And yet Munro is often joyous and funny, and this book is full not just of darkly jokey accident but of the voices of women often quite literally singing: “White Christmas” in the vivid and gritty “The Turkey Season”; “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in the haunted “Connection”; “In the Garden” in “Accident.” Women stand on their heads, make love in supply closets, gut turkeys with their bare hands. They are amused and amazed by their own journeys and landing places. A weave of surprise and inevitability in the destination more often favors surprise. “Aren’t we home?” are the last words of “Labor Day Dinner.” “She has a way to go yet” concludes “Accident.” Munro’s women may brood over their choices—which loneliness might have better suited them, which alliance might have best preserved the self: “I think of being an old maid, in another generation,” begins “Bardon Bus.” “There were plenty of old maids in my family. I come of straitened people, madly secretive, tenacious, economical. Like them, I could make a little go a long way.” But in the end there are powers beyond them that trump even the fierce will of the willful. The transits and upheaved settings of Munro’s stories make the formation of a character’s life a bit “catch-as-catch-can”—a term it’s possible to imagine is neither a fishing phrase nor a wrestling stance but, as a friend of mine likes to insist, the very name of a place in Canada.

  In The Moons of Jupiter, first published in 1982, Munro began a transition to a kind of story that was less linear, more layered with the pentimento of memory, a narrative able to head through and into time, forward or backward, pulling in somewhere as a car might do simply to turn around. These are the haphazard migrations of life and love, she seems to say, and the theme of accident—happy or unhappy or both or neither—is something she revisits in story after story. In “Accident,” the protagonist and h
er lover have their affair exposed when his son is killed sledding behind an automobile. That this is the man she eventually marries seems simultaneously cheaply arbitrary and fatefully expensive—it has transformed her life, and others’, and yet not: “She’s had her love, her scandal, her man, her children. But inside she’s ticking away, all by herself, the same Frances who was there before any of it.” The girl written forever within the woman, the childish script of adult romantic love, the incomplete life transitions trapped fast in psychic amber—these are part of Munro’s presentation of the human palimpsest, and these layerings help begin the more structurally daring stories for which she has, starting with this thrilling, magnificent collection, become renowned.

  (2006)

  Shakespeare: The Modern Elizabethan

  An academic colleague of mine once asked me who had made me into a writer. “And I don’t mean one of those creative writing professors,” he said to me, a creative writing professor.

  “Well, who do you mean?” I asked, probably ungrammatically, a thing creative writing professors get to do.

  “I mean, who was your Shakespeare professor?” he asked; he was of course a Shakespeare professor himself.

  I understood what he meant: Shakespeare was elemental, formative, fateful. Unlike the work of any writer before or since, Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, while taking advantage of an audience’s church-acquired tolerance for long speeches, celebrated the relatively new language of English and explored the strangeness within the ordinary and the familiar within the strange—the task of every artist. He returned again and again to the pathologies of love, marriage, and family—interest in which is a prerequisite for embarkation on an American literary life.

  My own Shakespeare professor, now a fellow at the Folger Library, was a brilliant, handsome, manic young man fairly fresh from Duke, who on the first day of class sang an entire verse of “Afternoon Delight,” clutching the lectern with bitter energy, to demonstrate to the students the all-pervasive and maddening junk he, as a Shakespearean, had been up against all summer.

  He once diagrammed Hamlet as a sort of Pollock painting, with color-coded chalk for the characters. He directed us in a homemade film of Romeo and Juliet, the Capulets in red pinnies. But in general, he simply, convincingly communicated his love of the work and helped the plays come alive. When asked by prospective students how a major in English prepared one for the real world, he did not mouth platitudes about languages or learning to think critically. He headed straight for Antony and Cleopatra: “When you are surrounded by enemy armies and your generals tell you one thing and your girlfriend tells you something else, listen to your generals. English literature teaches you that.” When I recently met him again in Washington, he said, with unsuppressed glee: “How long are you in town for? The Queen’s Folio is here!”

  Though many people have tried to insist that Shakespeare must have been a secret guild of theatricals, or the Earl of Oxford, or Sir Walter Raleigh, or some other person of education and rank (“How about the theory that Shakespeare is really Cliff Robertson?” joked a friend of mine), there is no doubt the man existed. Those who are still skeptical may be the same people who, generally pessimistic about human ability, insist that the pyramids were built by space aliens, or that Joyce Carol Oates is really a committee of middle-aged men. Or else they are the same elitists who think things like the roots of rock ’n’ roll are actually white.

  It seems clear—or at least we can say with a certain ad hoc confidence—that Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon 442 years ago today, the son of a Catholic mother and glove-maker father (Christopher Marlowe, his contemporary, was the son of a shoemaker—anyone got a problem with that?). He had one sister who lived into adulthood, and who may or may not have been the thwarted genius of Virginia Woolf’s imagining: “What would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith?” she wrote. What we do know, however, is that his sister was named not Judith but Joan. He also had three younger brothers, all of whom preceded him in death.

  Shakespeare’s eighth-grade education was enough to give him a good grasp of Latin, to help him land work perhaps as a legal assistant (the plays are full of knowledge of the law as well as of gloves), a tutor, a horse holder, and an actor. How many writers have had jobs like these? A lot.

  According to Stephen Greenblatt’s impressive biography, Will in the World, Shakespeare’s father’s success then failure in the glove business may have prevented Shakespeare from going on to Oxford or Cambridge as many of his classmates (and Christopher Marlowe) did, but this is not the same as an insistence that he was too uneducated to have written the plays.

  In Elizabethan England, apprentices abounded, as did pages and tutors, and Shakespeare would have easily made his way in that world. Actors had to know how to speak as gentlemen or bums, and carried around their own costumes and swords. The art and value of disguise, impersonation, and adaptation are usually learned young. The father’s mercantile life would have given the young son an early, indelible glimpse of all segments of society—rich and poor, rural and urban, successful and failed—and arguably gave Will, in part, the great comic character Falstaff: the drunken father figure whom the successful young man outgrows, outpaces, and renounces, though not without a chilling soupçon of hate.

  Shakespeare married early and, for practical reasons, someone older and richer (where there’s a will, Anne Hathaway, the old quip goes) and then left her behind to pursue revolutionary work in the world, only to return and take up companionship with her at the end. In this—and in his stalwart determination, knack for real estate, and penchant for petty lawsuits—he is reminiscent (to me) of George Washington, whose marriage was made similarly coolly and which for a good part of his life sat at that same convenient and pleasing distance (until retirement), while he annoyed the other Army officers in New Jersey by dancing with their wives.

  That Shakespeare’s most passionate loves were at first youthful and then adulterous is suggested by his plays, which scarcely have a happy marriage in them, let alone a happy family. Though one shouldn’t look to fictional work as autobiography, a writer will always write from what is on his mind, and somewhat from what he knows, and so the intensity and buffoonery of youthful erotic love and the low, miserable hum of marital discontent—famous as literary muses—were probably Shakespeare’s muses as well. Just as they were Charles Dickens’s (another actor-turned-writer). And Edith Wharton’s. And (remain) Alice Munro’s.

  The limberness of Shakespeare’s gift is arguably best demonstrated not by the greatest plays—Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth—but by two that are considered more minor, one a tragedy, one a comedy, and both written the same year, more likely the tragedy first, as the comedy is something of a satire on the tragedy. These are Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (That they might have been accruing simultaneously on his writing table is one of those events writers and critics alike are fond of imagining.) Comedy equals tragedy plus time.

  Though they each have their various textual sources—Shakespeare, like Puccini, was a notorious artistic poacher, so much so that tales of Shakespeare’s actual poaching of game have attached themselves to his legend—they are distinctly Shakespearean in their look at love.

  In Romeo and Juliet, however inconvenient Cupid’s choice, the energy of youthful love hurdles obstacles: “With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls,” says Romeo to Juliet, adding, “And what love can do, that dares love attempt.” Though at play’s end he is dead from his own hand, as is Juliet, victims in their own plot to outsmart the rather vicious society around them. Impetuosity never had a greater poet or a greater dramatist. Or a greater comedian.

  In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a kind of buddy tale of mind and body on a fated forest trudge, erotic love is quite literally a drug, defying all solemnity and even intelligence, washing the brain in potions, something modern scient
ists have at long last proven to be an accurate occurrence. The most beautiful creature of the forest is made to fall in love with a blustery bumpkin by the sad name of Bottom, who through fairy mischief is now sporting the head of, well, an ass. A donkey’s head: this is grotesquerie worthy of a Tim Burton movie. And it is all in service of Shakespeare’s compassionate skepticism about love.

  Each of these plays contains the other: A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains Romeo and Juliet in its enactment of the tragical tale of Pyramus and Thisbe but played for laughs:

  These yellow cowslip cheeks

  Are gone, are gone!

  Lovers make moan;

  His eyes were green as leeks.

  And Romeo and Juliet contains a window onto A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the comic relief of Romeo’s friend Mercutio, who throws barbs at the mere idea of romantic love to the comic approval of his entourage: “Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.”

  The structure of both these plays is intricate and geometrical. A Midsummer Night’s Dream moves easily in a single day among four different worlds and among the various romances giddily proceeding within them (some with more elegance than others). At the end of Romeo and Juliet the body count perfectly, symmetrically comprises two Montagues, two Capulets, and two relatives of the Prince. Death, not love, has the final blocking, though of course there is always the curtain call, and everyone is back up and alive again, as if to keep trying. Oh, why not.