Alice Munro’s “Walker Brothers Cowboy” and “Dance of the Happy Shades”

As a short story writer, Alice Munro is in the line of Chekhov. I like that she has great control and writes enough, suggesting much more underneath the surface. I like that she writes stories in which nothing happens, and yet at the end, something seems to happen to us. 

“Walker Brothers Cowboy” (in Selected Stories) is the first Alice Munro story I’ve ever read, and I like it a lot. It’s narrated by a young girl. Her father once had a fox farm but lost everything and now works for the Walker Brothers. 

“He sells cough medicine, iron tonic, corn plasters, laxatives, pills for female disorders, mouthwash, shampoo, liniment, salves, lemon and orange and raspberry concentrate for making refreshing drinks, vanilla, food coloring, black and green tea, ginger, cloves, and other spices, rat poison.”

The story flows slowly, naturally—the narrator introduces her father, then the location, then her father’s job, then her mother, then the story of the family—everything flows naturally—then the girl and her younger brother, to give the mother a rest, join the father on his trip to sell things at people’s houses, and we follow them—where is the story going? we wonder—then having done his job, he continues driving beyond his territory and meets a woman he hasn’t seen for a long time. That’s when “Walker Brothers Cowboy” takes a little turn, the way Chekhov’s stories always do. A little turn that gets you to see everything differently.

There are quite a few subtle things I like. For example, we’re not told till that moment in Nora’s house, when it’s necessary, that the father is called Ben Jordan. We’re never told about the relationship between him and Nora. We’re never told about the incompatibility between him and his wife. Everything gradually unfolds, and Alice Munro adds nothing superfluous. 

But the thing I particularly like is that she gets us to see the father differently: 

“She and my father drink and I know what it is. Whisky. One of the things my mother has told me in our talks together is that my father never drinks whisky. But I see he does. He drinks whisky and he talks of people whose names I have never heard before.” 

It’s so “soft” that it doesn’t feel like an epiphany. Shortly after, Nora puts music on and turns towards the girl: 

““A big girl like you and so good-looking and can’t dance!” says Nora. “It’s high time you learned. I bet you’d make a lovely dancer. Here, I’m going to put on a piece I used to dance to and even your daddy did, in his dancing days. You didn’t know your daddy was a dancer, did you? Well, he is a talented man, your daddy!”” 

These little moments make us see the father in a different light, and get us to care about him—about the man he once was, the man he might have been. At the same time, Alice Munro has the young daughter narrate the story and therefore adds the perspective, the relatable feeling when one discovers something new, something unexpected about one’s parents, about who they used to be and what they were like before getting married and becoming parents.  

“So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.” 

The ending enlarges the story. 

“Dance of the Happy Shades” is a story in which there’s even less happening: it’s about one of the boring “parties”— more like recitals—of an old piano teacher named Miss Marsalles, who “was unable to criticize except in the most delicate and apologetic way and her praises were unforgivably dishonest; it took an unusually conscientious pupil to come through with anything like a creditable performance”. 

I could summarise the plot and write about the story but I’m more interested in the writing. 

“Even the shadow behind her of another Miss Marsalles, slightly older, larger, grimmer, whose existence was always forgotten from one June to the next, was not discomfiting—though it was surely an arresting fact that there should be not one but two faces like that in the world, both long, gravel-colored, kindly, and grotesque, with enormous noses and tiny, red, sweet-tempered and shortsighted eyes. It must finally have come to seem like a piece of luck to them to be so ugly, a protection against life to be marked in so many ways, impossible, for they were gay as invulnerable and childish people are; they appeared sexless, wild, and gentle creatures, bizarre yet domestic, living in their house in Rosedale outside the complications of time.” 

Like Chekhov, Alice Munro doesn’t have an ornate style, a style that draws attention to itself. But the style, or perhaps the voice, of “Dance of the Happy Shades” is more interesting than in “Walker Brothers Cowboy”—probably because it’s narrated by a pupil who doesn’t love Miss Marsalles? 

Like the narrator, most of Miss Marsalles’s pupils now are the children of her old pupils: 

“Here they found themselves year after year—a group of busy, youngish women who had eased their cars impatiently through the archaic streets of Rosedale, who had complained for a week previously about the time lost, the fuss over the children’s dresses, and, above all, the boredom, but who were drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance—not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles’ living room. The little girls in dresses with skirts as stiff as bells moved with a natural awareness of ceremony against the dark walls of books, and their mothers’ faces wore the dull, not unpleasant look of acquiescence, the touch of absurd and slightly artificial nostalgia which would carry them through any lengthy family ritual.” 

Not ornate, but not bland. 

“The plates of sandwiches are set out, as they must have been for several hours now; you can see how the ones on top are beginning to curl very slightly at the edges. Flies buzz over the table, settle on the sandwiches, and crawl comfortably across the plates of little iced cakes brought from the bakery. The cut-glass bowl, sitting as usual in the center of the table, is full of purple punch, without ice apparently and going flat.

[…] My mother seems unable, although she makes a great effort, to take her eyes off the dining-room table and the complacent journeys of the marauding flies. Finally she achieves a dreamy, distant look, with her eyes focussed somewhere above the punch bowl, which makes it possible for her to keep her head turned in that direction and yet does not in any positive sense give her away. Miss Marsalles as well has trouble keeping her eyes on the performers; she keeps looking towards the door. Does she expect that even now some of the unexplained absentees may turn up?” 

I shall not write about the little turn in the later part of the story, nor the ending. But I’d note that throughout the story, the narrator, clearly influenced by her genteel mother, sees and depicts Miss Marsalles as a pathetic, rather absurd old woman, a mediocre piano teacher who foolishly thinks she can see into children’s hearts; Alice Munro builds it up till that little turn near the end of the story, and then gets us to see Miss Marsalles and all the characters in a different light. And she presents her characters as they are, without moralising, in a style that doesn’t draw attention to itself.

It is very good.