Author Elizabeth Hay (L) holds the Giller Prize, Canada’s richest literary award, for her novel “Late Nights On Air” as she is congratulated by fellow Canadian writer Alice Munroe at the end of the Giller awards ceremony in Toronto November 6, 2007. (Reuters)
I am sitting in my study staring at my copy of Alice Munro’s New Selected Stories, a collection of some of her “finest work” from her last five published volumes, (a somewhat arbitrary decision — who decides this anyway?) put together on the occasion of her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. I have just heard of her death. The first reaction I usually have on hearing of a writer’s demise, that is of a writer who has mattered to me, is now that voice has gone, that unique and peculiar stream of words has stopped forever. This is how it was with Javier Marias, Paul Auster, Martin Amis, all so recently deceased.
With Alice Munro, the feeling is more intimate. I related to her writing in a way I couldn’t to Marias et al. Her worlds could be my worlds. Not literally, but in the way in which she wrote about them. Her subject was the daily life of men, women and children, their thoughts and feelings as they go through childhood, school, college, marriage, old age and death, in a movement both swift and slow. Swift because so much was encompassed in 30-40-50 pages, while her attention to detail slowed down the narrative pace as she described incidents that illustrated whole lives.
I flip through the New Selected Stories to remind me of how this writer once spoke to me. I reread the first story, ‘The Love of a Good Woman’, reprinted from her 1998 eponymous volume.
If anything, I admire it more than I did before. This is the work of a very skilled writer, a writer whose craft is honed to perfection. It’s not showy, it does not call attention to itself, it’s a clear prism between the author and the reader. In the words of James Joyce — a writer whom Munro resembles not at all — “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
‘The Love of a Good Woman’, like all of Munro’s writing, is rich in detail. The details of houses, of smells, of people’s faces, of their bodies, of the hair on their bodies, of the food, of the way eggs crinkle around the edges when they are fried. Each one says something about the person, the place. Gradually she opens up a world, so fully imagined, that it seems this is not a short story we are reading, but the history of a community. And to do that in 53 pages! Only complete mastery of your craft enables you to do that.
To return to the fried eggs mentioned earlier; these eggs stayed in my mind, and for good reason. A whole world is contained in them. A boy, maybe 10, is frying the eggs, none of his friends know how good he is in the kitchen. His mother watches him, she is unable to do much, and he is much better at frying than she is. They are both tense, the father can arrive any time, drunk or savage, lose his temper, and throw eggs and all on the floor. Or he can ask the boy to make him eggs the way he likes them, “hard as shoe leather” (a reflection of the man) while at the same time needling him about his skills: “He would make some fellow a dandy wife.” Tension and violence hover in the kitchen, three lives, tied, bound and delivered in all their tragedy and pathos.
Munro treats her men as delicately and realistically as her women. The Bear Came Over the Mountain is about a man whose wife has dementia. This story illustrates the ease and brilliance with which she spans time. From that past to this, from that state of love, emotion, attraction, sex, fidelity, infidelity, to this. The number of pages (35) in which this is done is deceptive, for the shifts in time and perspective give the stories a depth that is the height of economic artistry, and that one usually associates with novels.
Her work is timeless. It doesn’t matter where or when she sets her stories — what matters is that she can say of a character, “She was insulted, by her own mind” (‘The Love of a Good Woman’), which is a sentence that leaps out at you. It can reflect you, or anybody you know.
Looking at New Selected Stories, I am revisited by an old desire. I want to write like Alice Munro. But then I realise that the whole point of Alice Munro is to teach a person to write fully and completely as themselves. It seems a simple lesson — but hard to follow as you try to polish your own writing style in a way that is true to yourself and to what you have to say.
Manju Kapur is the author, most recently of, The Gallery.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
First uploaded on: 18-05-2024 at 12:50 IST
